Artistic Labour Under Advanced

Capitalism

Josefine Wikström
M00273686

Dissertation

MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory

September 2010
Middlesex University

Supervised by Peter Osborne

14865 words
ABSTRACT


Post-Workerists’ claim that post-industrial labour-forms are creative although deeply
entwined in a capitalist mode of production puts the idea of artistic labour into crisis.
This dissertation is an attempt to investigate what implications the post-Workerist
mode of looking at labour today have for the concept of artistic labour in the 21st
century. It explores the idea that Post-Fordist labour-forms have an inherent creative
potential and therefore dissolves into artistic labour. It does this by looking at
Antonio Negri’s interpretation of Karl Marx’s term the ‘general intellect’ found in the
Grundrisse. The dissertation claims that Negri’s conception of the ‘general intellect’
is based on the wrongly made assumption that capitalism has an end point. It further
claims that this undermines Negri’s idea that post-Fordistic labour is creative and
instead shows that it is the opposite to creative labour, namely real subsumed labour.
This leads to the conclusion of the paper which is that it is necessary to distinguish
artistic labour from productive labour.


 2

CONTENTS

Introduction
1. Productive Labour in Marx
2.1. Another Ontology of Productivity
2.2. The Logic of Limitlessness: Capital's Capacity for Expansion
3. Artistic Labour’s Capacity for Transforming Alienated Labour


 3

INTRODUCTION

In the 1990’s, Italian autonomism was recuperated and radicalised. The emphasis on
workers’ autonomy and subjectivity was again considered vital for workers’
emancipation from the capitalist mode of production. As in the 1960’s and 1970’s,
the focus was anew on workers’ self-valorisation and the creative aspect of labour.
Michael Hardt points out that the main slogan of the first stage of the autonomia
movement in the early 1960’s, “refusal of work”1 did not mean “a refusal of creative
or productive activity but rather a refusal of work within the established capitalist
relations of production.”2 This refusal of work took place within the production
process itself, in forms of sabotage of the production process, such as the slowing
down and counter use of machinery.
Contemporary autonomists agree that the struggle against the capitalist mode
of production should take place within the labour process. However, what crucially
differentiates them from earlier autonomists is that they believe that contemporary
forms of labour, which have developed with advanced capitalism, have an immanent
potential for workers’ self-valorisation and thus subjectivity and autonomy. Writers
such as Antonio Negri, Paulo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato therefore see a huge
potential in these new forms of labour that have emerged with the contemporary
economy, such as those performed in the communication-, entertainment- and
information-industries, which have been termed ‘immaterial labour’ by Maurizio
Lazzarato.3. They argue that the potential in these labours lies in the fact that they
require co-operational skills, knowledge and creative subjectivities, which therefore
bring a creative aspect to the labour process. With these new forms of labour, the
production of commodities and the reproduction of life are merged together and
productive labour, therefore, becomes creative and emancipatory as well as
subsuming and alienating.
Crucial within these writings is the concept of the ‘general intellect’, which is
taken from a section known as the “Fragment on Machines” in Karl Marx’s


























































1 Michael Hardt, introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt
(Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996), 2.
2 Hardt, introduction, 2.
3 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael
Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996), 132-146.


 4

Grundrisse. Also sometimes termed ‘mass intellectuality’, it proposes that the
increased exchange of knowledge, co-operational and communicational skills within
the new forms of labour developed in advanced capitalism, produces a collective and
creative intellect governed by the workers. So, in these writings, the ‘general
intellect’ becomes an expression for a communist society in which emancipated
labour is produced and exchanged creatively.
The contemporary autonomists’ account of productive labour as creative,
emancipatory and thus as the reproduction of life, leaves the question of artistic
labour hanging. Some would argue that the role of artists since early modernism has
been to criticise the capitalist form of value and its labour-processes. Movements
such as Constructivism, Surrealism and Bauhaus, and artists such as Marcel
Duchamp and Andy Warhol, all imply a harsh critique of the capitalist mode of
production within their practices. If that critique is now supposed to be found in all
forms of labour processes – although mainly within the creative, entertainment and
communication industries – how does artistic labour fit into this? It is within this
broad context that I would like to ask: How can we understand artistic labour under
advanced capitalism?
There is no easy and obvious way to investigate the concept of artistic labour
today. The two main and overall questions I want to ask are firstly: Does artistic
labour differentiate itself ontologically from productive labour? And secondly, is it
necessary for artistic labour to differentiate itself ontologically from productive
labour in order to function critically? To answer these questions I want to look at
three very different, although interconnected, traditions of thinking. Firstly, Marx’s
account of productive labour, secondly, Negri’s account of both productive and
artistic labour, and thirdly, John Roberts’ post-Adornian concept of artistic labour.
At the heart of contemporary autonomists’ appropriation of Marx’s term
‘general intellect’, lies an account of productivity conceived, as I have already
mentioned, not only as the production of commodities, but also as the reproduction of
subjectivities and thus of life in a broader sense. The most developed analysis of the
‘general intellect’ is done by Antonio Negri in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the
Grundrisse, and, more specifically, in Chapter Seven: “The Theory of the Wage and
Its Developments”, of that book in which he analyses the “Fragment on Machines.” I
will therefore take Negri’s analysis of the “Fragment on Machines” as the point of
departure and main focus for my analysis. The questions I want to ask in this section


 5

of my thesis are: What is Negri’s account of productive labour? On what assumptions
does he base that account? And what are the implications of his definition of
productive labour for the concept of artistic labour? The main argument I want to
bring forth in this section is that Negri’s reading of the “Fragment on Machines” is
based on the idea that capitalism would reach a culmination or a limit. My claim is
that Marx’s short investigation into developed machinery is the exposition of
precisely the opposite of that, namely capital’s capacity to continuously expand itself.
In order to understand how Negri’s concept of productivity differentiates itself
from Marx’s I will first look into Marx’s concept of productive labour in detail. The
overall question I want to ask in my investigation of Marx’s concept of productive
labour is: What is Marx’s concept of productive labour and how does it relate itself to
non-material forms of labour such as service- and artistic labours? My main claim is
that Marx does not differentiate non-material labours ontologically from productive
labour.
As a counter reading to Negri I will then examine Roberts’ post-Adornian
account of artistic labour as the potential site for a transformation of alienated labour,
through what he calls a process of deskilling and reskilling. Roberts articulates how
artistic labour, through its ability of transforming its materials and therefore escape
the law of value and the technical division of labour, can transform productive
alienated labour into non-alienated labour. My aim with this final chapter is to expose
an account in which artistic labour achieves its transformative potenital of productive
labour by firmly distinguishing itself from productive labour.


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1. PRODUCTIVE LABOUR IN MARX

Marx’s definition of productive labour is crucial for my investigation of artistic

labour under advanced capitalism. Firstly, because it provides a basis for
understanding artistic labour in relation to the theory of value, that is, its relation to
the logic of capital. Secondly, because Negri’s notion of ‘self-valorisation’ – which I
have used in my analysis – is founded on an expanded, radicalized and inverted
version of Marx’s concept of productive labour. In order to illuminate Negri’s
operation in relation to Marx’s concept, as well as to open up possibilities for a
broader understanding of artistic labour, I will look at Marx’s concept of productive
labour in detail.

In Capital, Vol. I (Chapter Seven: “The Labour Process and the Valorisation
Process”), Marx gives a general account of productive labour independent from
historical conditions, as the process in which human man creatively interacts with
nature and makes tools he needs by using his whole body and all the powers of his
mind. Labour appears here as a natural, creative and essential process between man
and the nature around him. Marx defines this process, not merely as ‘labour’, but as
‘productive labour’. “If we look at the whole process from the point of view of its
result, the product, it is plain that both instruments and the object of labour are means
of production and that the labour itself is productive labour.”4
A more specified distinction of productive labour appears further into the
same volume of Capital (Chapter Sixteen: “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value”),
where Marx states that his earlier definition is incapable of giving an account of
productive labour under the specific form of capitalistic production. Merely to
produce is no longer enough. Within the logic of capitalism, labour is only productive
if it produces surplus value.5 The same applies to the productive worker. “The only
worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in


























































4 C, 287.
5 Marx defines the production of surplus value as specific for the capitalist mode of production and something based on the
exploitation of workers. Surplus value appears when the workers labour more than necessary for their means of reproduction.
“The prolongation of the working day beyond the point at which the worker would have produced an exact equivalent for the
value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus labour by capital – this is the process which constitutes the
production of absolute surplus-value.” C,645.


 7

other words contributes towards the self-valorisation of capital.”6 Important here is
Marx’s emphasis on capital’s indifference to the nature of the production process as
such.

“If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a
school master is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads
of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school.
That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage
factory, make no difference to the relation.”7

We can therefore conclude that the production of surplus value according to Marx not
is connected to the content of the labour. It is solely dependent on the social relations
under which it is produced. Productive labour implies “a specifically social relation
of production.”8 Defined as a social relation, productive labour can only be defined as
such if workers are employed by a capitalist – who for free achieves the surplus-
value.
In the Appendix (an early draft of Capital, first time published in 1939 after
Marx’s death) entitled “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” we find an
account of productive and unproductive labour almost identical to the one outlined in
Chapter Seven and Sixteen. Productive labour is that which produces surplus value,
i.e. “it is productive if it is realized in a surplus-value without any equivalent for the
worker.”9 Whether a labour-process is productive or not is therefore “utterly
unconnected with the specific content of the labour, with its particular utility or the
use-value in which it is objectified. Hence the labour with the same content can be
either productive or unproductive.”10 However, there is a difference between the
account of productive labour in the Appendix and the account in the earlier
mentioned chapters: the Appendix includes an expanded exploration of productive
labour in non-material forms, such as service-labours and different forms of artistic
labour. This discussion takes off with the distinction between wage-labour and
productive labour. A wage-labourer, writes Marx, is someone who sells his labour-


























































6 C, 644.
7 C, 644.
8 C, 644.
9 CA, 1039.
10 CA, 1044.


 8

power in exchange for money. The same wage-labourer becomes productive only if
his labour-power gets fully “incorporated in the capitalist process of production.”11 So
only when workers are part of the production process as living capital can they
produce surplus value. Wage-labourers are not, therefore, necessarily productive
labourers. Productive labourers, on the other hand, always have to be wage-labourers,
according to Marx.
Marx claims that under the developed form of capitalism all products of
labour – both material and non-material – turn into commodities and all workers into
wage-labourers. This makes it complex to distinguish between wage-labour and
productive labour. The danger, Marx claims, is on the one hand to assume that all
wage-labour is productive and on the other hand, to categorize all productive labour
as wage-labour because they might share the same characteristics. It is therefore
important, Marx emphasises, not to forget that the productive character of labour has
nothing to do with the content but only with the social relation between the buyer and
seller of labour-power. “A soldier is a wage-labourer, a mercenary, but this does not
make a productive worker of him.”12
Despite the complexity of distinguishing productive labour from wage-labour,
Marx firmly holds to the position that productive labour is to do with a social relation,
not the content of the labour. He shows this with three examples. These examples are
important, firstly, because they affirm the indifference of the content of labour.
Secondly, they are to be seen as the exposition of the passage from ‘formal’ to ‘real’
subsumption, a distinction made by Marx and which I will discuss futher on. Finally,
these examples are important because they are dominated by what could be
categorised as artistic labour.
The first example is Milton – the author of Paradise Lost – who, Marx claims,
was an unproductive writer because he produced it “as a silkworm produces silk, as
the activation of his own nature.”13 An author who writes regularly for a publisher in a
factory-style is on the other hand, a productive worker. The second example is that of
a singer. A singer who sings like a bird is simply an unproductive worker. A singer
who sings for money is a wage-labourer. And a singer who is employed by an
entrepreneur to sing is a productive worker. The third and last example is the

























































11 CA,1041.
12 CA, 1042.
13 CA, 1044.


 9

profession of teaching, in which Marx states that a teacher “who instructs others is
not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution
along with others, using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur
who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker.”14
Despite the fact that these three examples clearly affirm the definition of
productive labour as a specific social relation between the producer and the purchaser
of labour-power, Marx concludes that these types of work do not need to be
considered other than as wage-labours and therefore not productive. What appears as
a fundamental contradiction here in Marx is, however, simply to do with that these
labours constitute such a small part of the production in capitalism as a whole.

“But for the most part, work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being
subsumed even formally under capital, and belongs essentially to a transitional stage. On
the whole, types of work that are consumed as services and not in products separable
form the worker and hence not capable of existing as commodities independently of him,
but which are yet capable of being directly exploited in capitalist terms, are of
microscopic significance when compared with the mass of capitalist production. They
may be entirely neglected, therefore, and can be dealt with under the category of wage-
labour that is not at the same time productive labour.”15

Marx distinguishes between two forms of non-material labour. The first one is
processes of production where the products are possible to divide from the labour-
process. This would include, for example, the production of paintings and books. In
these production processes the “capitalist production is possible only within very
narrow limits.”16 Even artists or booksellers who employ assistants are only possible
of producing capital in a formal sense. The second form is products individisible from
the act of producing, in which the “capitalist mode of production occurs only on a
limited scale.”17 It is important to note that even in these unusual production processes
the definition of productive labour is still a social relation.

Marx’s account of artistic labour is, as John Roberts correctly points out, very limited


























































14 CA, 1044.
15 CA, 1044-1045.
16 CA, 1048.
17 CA, 1048.


 10

as Marx only mentions a “small number of particular artists.”18 I would however
argue that we can conclude that Marx does not distinguish artistic labour – or any
other non-material form of labour – ontologically from productive labour. Non-
material labour, artistic labour included, has the capacity, or runs the risk – depending
on how you see it, as any other type of labour, to produce surplus-value. We have,
however, seen that Marx tends to remove artistic labour from the category of
productive labour. It can therefore seem as if he claims two things at once: on the one
hand, that productive labour is a social relation indifferent to the content of the labour
as such; and on the other, that non-material labours such as artistic labours should not
be included within the capitalist production, as the wealth it contributes to capitalism,
as a whole is minimal. Is this seeming contradiction a more fundamental claim about
so-called non-material labours? And what does it say about artistic labour?

FORMAL AND REAL SUBSUMPTION

When Marx writes that we don’t need to consider non-material labours such as
artistic labours, as productive labour, it is a quantitative, not a qualitative issue. By
that I mean that non-material labours such as teaching and painting were in Marx’s
time of “microscopic significance”19 for the economy as a whole. This was not
dependent on the nature of these forms of labour, but on the proportion of the
economy that they took up. The apparent contradiction in Marx’s account of whether
or not non-material forms of labour are productive is therefore, I would suggest, to do
with the historical and logical development of capitalism. To fully understand the
development of capitalism, in relation to productive labour, we must therefore
connect it to Marx’s distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subumption of labour.
Marx makes the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labour to capital
in the Appendix to Capital, already mentioned. This distinction is crucial to
understand Marx’s definition of productive labour in relation to non-material labours
such as artistic labour.
The formal subsumption of labour, Marx explains, is the “general form of
every capitalist process of production”20 and is only “formally distinct from earlier


























































18 IoF, 28.
19 CA, 1048.
20 CA, 1019.


 11

modes of production.”21 It is, in other words, the appropriation by capital of already
existing forms of labour, invented before capital. For example, under formal
subsumption the guild master and his apprentices are replaced with the capitalist and
the wage-labourer. In the same way, the farmer who before produced for his family,
now – with the same production – becomes a productive wage-labourer governed by
the capitalist. As the examples show, the formal subsumption of labour to capital
does not involve any technological changes within the actual labour process. What
changes is only the speed and scale of production, which becomes more continuous
and bigger than in earlier production processes. They therefore only imply, what
Marx calls, “gradual consequences”22 for the process of production.
Formal subsumption is further distinguished by Marx as the production of
absolute surplus value, which it is only possible to increase through lengthening the
working day. “In the formal subsumption of labour under capital, this is the sole
manner of producing surplus-value.”23 Capital can however not expand significantly
as long as it sticks to this relation because “it is based on small capitalists who differ
only slightly from the workers in their education and their activities.”24 Since the
changes under the formal subsumption of labour are only gradual, qualitative
differences between different labours do still exist under this form of production.
Real subsumption of labour, Marx continues, is a developed form of formal
subsumption, and, more importantly, is the “specifically capitalist mode of
production.”25 In opposition to the formal subsumption of labour, the change in the
labour process is now, not only quantitative and gradual, but qualitative. In the real
subsumption of labour, it is not merely individual parts of the production that change,
the real subsumption “revolutionizes their actual mode of labour and the real nature
of the labour process as a whole.”26
Under the fully developed capitalist form, i.e. the real subsumption of labour,
the production process is characterised by large-scale machinery requiring advanced
technological and scientific developments. All forces of society are therefore
subsumed into the labour process, which is “the transformation of production by the

























































21 CA, 1025.
22 CA, 1021.
23 CA, 1021.
24 CA, 1027.
25 CA, 1021.
26 CA, 1021.


 12

conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends,
technology, etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale responding to
such developments.”27 Under the real subsumption of labour to capital, all social
forces in society are needed for the development of the production processes. In this
stage of capitalism, living labour is therefore directly subsumed to capital.
The real subsumption of labour, is further characterized by it producing
relative surplus value. As Chapter Eleven in Capital Vol. I shows, relative surplus
value can only grow through an increase in the intensity of production, i.e. in a
reduction of necessary labour. This reduction of necessary labour is realised when
technological and scientific developments make the time for the production of each
commodity shorter, in order to produce more and on a larger scale.
It is only with the distinction between real and formal subsumption of labour
to capital that we can understand why Marx seems to remove non-material labourers
such as waiters and artists from the realm of productive labour. Non-material
labourers, including artists, were in Marx’s time of insignificant proportion, in
relation to the entire production in society. Today, on the opposite, they are largely
recognised as constituting a major part of the economy and therefore, I claim, cannot
be neglected.

PRODUCTIVE AND CIRCULATING CAPITAL

In the Grundrisse, which, like the Appendix, was also published after Marx’s death,
productive labour is defined as a social relation. However, we also find here an
expanded discussion of the concept of productive labour in relation to circulation.
In a footnote – used by Negri, in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the
Grundrisse, in order to criticise Marx’s definition of productive labour – Marx claims
that labours not directly producing capital cannot be defined as productive labour. It
is obvious that workers who smoke tobacco, rather than producing it, not are
productive. However, the other examples given by Marx of non-productive workers
are those who provide services or artistic forms of labour. In a similar manner to the
sections already described in Capital, Marx seems to remove all non-material
labourers from the category of productive labour. The reason, Marx argues, is that
there is only a simple exchange in these sorts of labours, meaning that they belong


























































27 CA,1024.


 13

only to the sphere of circulation, which makes them incapable of producing capital.

“The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the
money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is
consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it
is not consumption of capital.”28

Similar to the cases where Marx seemed to exclude non-material labours from
the realm of productive labour because of the minimal proportion they take up in
capitalist production, and which I discussed earlier, his claim that labours existing in
the sphere of circulation are incapable of producing surplus-value, must also, I claim,
be considered in relation to the distinction between formal and real subsumption.
Non-material labours do today, as already mentioned, make up a significant
proportion of the world economy. We must however also, in order to understand his
condemnation of labours existing in the sphere of circulation, look at his conception
of the realisation of value.
Marx separates the process of production from circulation by defining the first
as the site of surplus value and the second, as the circulation of it. The circulation is
however crucial for the realization of the surplus value produced in the production
process. In Chapter Four of Capital Vol I Marx claims: “[t]he circulation of
commodities is the starting point of capital.”29 He does so by distinguishing between
two sorts of circulation. Simple circulation is when a commodity is sold for money
only in order to buy another commodity. No money is therefore expended but “spent
once and for all.”30 However, in the circulation specific to capitalism, a commodity is
bought for money in order to be sold again for a higher price. The money in this
process of circulation is therefore “not spent, it is merely advanced.”31

“Withdrawn from circulation, it [capital] is petrified into a hoard, and it could

remain in that position until the Last Judgment without a single farthing accruing
it. […] As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for
the valorisation of value takes place within this constantly renewed movement.”32


























































28 GR,272.
29 C, 247.
30 C, 249.
31 C, 249.
32 C, 252-253.


 14

Despite the fact that the ‘realisation’ of capital in itself is not ‘productive’ of surplus-
value, the self-valorisation of capital is nonetheless dependent upon it. Non-material
labours, such as artistic labour, existing in the realm of circulationm may no in
themselves be ‘productive’ but are however crucial for the realisation of capital.


Marx did not ontologically distinguish between productive labour and non-material
labour, including artistic labour. Does this mean that Marx did not believe in the
critical and transformative power of art or artistic labour? We can only conclude that
he did not as long as artistic labour contained the same social relation as that of
productive labour. Artistic labour, does in Marx, therefore not simply dissolve into
productive labour. It only does so if its relations of production are the same as in the
latter’s.




 15

2.1. ANOTHER ONTOLOGY OF PRODUCTIVITY

In his article “Metamorphoses” Negri makes the claim that artistic labour today not
distinguishes itself ontologically from any other form of labour. This has, however
not always been the case, he writes, but is specific to the post-Fordist labour-process
which emerged in the late 1960’s and which is still the ruling mode of production.
The reason why artistic labour today not differentiates itself as such from productive
labour is because the contemporary post-capitalist economy has introduced new
forms of labour that have fundamentally changed the very concept of productivity
and productive labour.
According to Negri, has artistic labour always been running parallel with the
general modes of production in society, making it possible to outline a
“correspondance between the different epochs of artistic activity […] on the one
hand, and the forms of capitalist production and organization of labour, on the
other.”33 The years between 1848 and 1914, described by Negri as “the first great
episodes of industrial and metropolitan centralization in the exploitation of labour-
power,”34 brought an increased sense of the materiality of the working-class as well
as the self-management of workers as a response to the deepening technical division
of labour. These fundamental changes in the mode of production expressed
themselves, Negri claims, on the one hand, in realistic painting, and, on the other
hand, in the dissolution and possible reconstruction from “within the ‘mode of
production’”35 in Impressionism. The period between 1917 and 1968 is the
revolutionary phase of artistic and productive labour, according to Negri. The
alienation of labour increases in this period, however resulting in a stronger working-
class subject. (I will return to Negri’s account of the working-class subject.) “This is
the period in which abstraction and production are intertwined.”36 This
transformation of the labour process can be seen in the work of artists such as
Picasso, Duchamp, and Raushenberg, who all share an experience of “a subject
capable of demystifying the fetishised destiny imposed by capital.”37


























































33 MM, 21.
34 MM, 21.
35 MM, 21.
36 MM, 21.
37 MM, 22.


 16

 The current periodisation started in 1968 and is, claims Negri, characterised
by biopolitical and cognitive labour-processes, that is, labours in which the
production of commodities and the production of life have merged together. Labour
therefore, Negri claims, have undergone a metamorphosis and is now any longer
abstracted but instead a “vital excess beyond measure”38 which “transcends […] the
independence and autonomy of its own production.”39 Creativity is no more, claims
Negri, connected to ‘creation’ or ‘sublimation’ but to the biopolitical labour of life.
Negri argues that artistic labour today is – as each activity in capitalism –a
commodity and an activity. Uninterested in the aspect of artistic activity that
produces commodities, Negri emphasises instead “that mode of producing art which
is nothing other than the figure, the power of being creative in the world.”40 This is
why artistic labour, in the current mode of production achieves the “ontological
relevance possessed by all forms of labour in their creative facet.”41 This
convergence of artistic labour and cognitive productive labour further means that “the
desire for artistic expression is to be found everywhere.”42
If the concept of artistic labour is fairly absent in Marx, it is even more so in
the writings of Negri and other post-autonomists. Negri’s article “Metamorphoses” is
a rare example of a direct reference to artistic labour but does however express what
is present, but not explicit, in his other writings. By that I mean that, despite his lack
of discussion of artistic labour, his definition of productive labour automatically
subsumes all other forms of labour into its definition, artistic labour included.
Negri’s inclusion of artistic labour within the category of productive labour in
“Metamorphoses” does not however, imply the same thing as when Marx not
distinguishes artistic labour ontologically from productive labour. For Marx does
artistic labour not differentiate itself as such from productive labour and this is
because of the law of value’s indifference to the content of the labour process. The
consequence of this is that artistic labour always run the risk of being as alienated as
productive labour. Negri, on the other hand, includes artistic labour into the category
of productive labour to point at the creative form it has now taken.


























































38 MM, 24.
39 MM, 24.
40 MM, 22.
41 MM, 22.
42 MM, 23.


 17

 Negri’s concept of productive labour as a “creative excess”43 and that
“discovers forms for a surplus of productivity”44 is a central aspect of the entire post-
autonomist movement of which he is a part. For example, Lazzarato writes that
immaterial labour is:

“tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life produce. Creativity and
productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one hand, in the dialectic
between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the other, in the
activities of subjects that constitute them.”45 



In a similar manner, Negri and Hardt claim in Empire that the production of life and
the production of capital are now indivisible. The contemporary global economy,
they claim, has brought with it labours in which “knowledge, information, affect, and
communication”46 are immanent to the production process. Labour has, as a
consequence, become a fundamentally creative process and appears “as the power to
act”47 and as a collective body. “Today labour is immediately a social force animated
by the powers of knowledge”48 and must therefore be conceived as “the productive
activity of a general intellect.”49
One of the first, and undoubtedly the most developed, analyses of this concept
of productive labour was carried out by Negri himself in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons
on the Grundrisse. In this chapter I will look, therefore, at Negri’s analysis of Marx’s
concept of productive labour and the ‘general intellect.’ The overall questions I want
to ask are: how did Negri get to this concept of productive labour? By that I mean, on
what assumptions do Negri construct his concept of productive labour? And what
implications does Negri’s concept of productive labour have for the concept of
artistic labour?

Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse consists of a set of lectures on Marx’s
Grundrisse made by Negri in Paris in 1978 (although not published until 1991), on

























































43 MM, 24.
44 MM, 23.
45 Lazzarato. “Immaterial Labour,” 146.
46 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), 285.
47 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 358.
48 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 357.
49 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 358.


 18

the invitation of Louis Althusser. The book is an analysis of the seven notebooks
constituting the Grundrisse, and, moreover, an attempt to go beyond an examination
of capitalism merely from the point of view of capital. Departing from Marx’s text
and then radicalising it, Negri proposes the possibility for the subversion of
capitalism followed by a collective and creative labour-process identified with
communism. This subversion of capitalism is dependent on Negri’s recuperation and
developed theory of the subjectivity of workers. Before I go into Negri’s analysis I
want to contextualise it with a brief exposition of Marx’s main claim in these pages.
The concept of the ‘general intellect’ appears in a section of the Grundrisse
which is about ten pages, (beginning by the end of Notebook Six, and continuing a
few pages into Notebook Seven) and is usually known as the “Fragment on
Machines”. Marx introduces the section by reminding us that the means of labour in
the processes of production have always been in continuous transformation. This
transformation is the outcome of capital’s tendency of appropriating the means of
labour needed for its production process. The means of labour have therefore
traditionally, Marx says, only undergone a “formal modification.”50 By that he refers
to the fact that the means of production have been included in the realisation process
of capital in such a way that they at one point of the production cycle have appeared
as the means of labour and at another point as a specific mode of capital “determined
by its total process – as fixed capital.”51 The main claim Marx makes in these pages is
that the final stage in the transformation of the means of labour into capital is “an
automatic system of machinery.”52 Once advanced machinery is introduced to the
process of production, the appropriation of living labour is no longer formal but real.
The real appropriation of living labour – expressed in advanced machinery –
appears, writes Marx, when all science and knowledge in society have been
subsumed and appropriated into the production process by capital. When capital in
this way adapts the general accumulation of knowledge to become the means of
labour, which it then turns into capital, “general social labour presents itself not in
labour but in capital.”53 This final stage of the adaptation of the means of labour by
capital is described by Marx as the transformation of a simple labour process into a


























































50 GR, 692.
51 GR, 692.
52 GR, 692.
53 GR, 694.


 19

scientific one, and is governed by what Marx calls the ‘general intellect’.

“The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social

knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence,
the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of
the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree
the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of
knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life
process.”54

NEGRI’S READING OF “FRAGMENT ON MACHINES”

One of Negri’s main claims and points of departure in his lessons on the Grundrisse
is that capitalism is constructed in an antagonistic way, manifesting itself as a
separation between workers and capital. In its exploitative form, this antagonism is
the natural development of capitalism. The more capital exploit workers, the more the
antagonism deepens. The Grundrisse, Negri claims, is an exposition of the successive
stages of this antagonistic development of capitalism.
In Chapter Seven: “The Theory of the Wage and Its Developments”, Negri
proceeds by claiming that the antagonistic separation between capitalists and
workers, not only is the natural logic of capitalism’s development, but is also “the
key” to the workers’ emancipation from capital. This “key” reveals itself when the
antagonistic relation between workers and capital has reached its culmination point,
in which it implodes and inverts itself. More specifically does this culmination,
claims Negri, take place when the modes of production have been developed to the
stage Marx terms the “automatic system of machinery.”55
Negri's exposition of the “Fragment on Machines” can be divided, I would
suggest, into two moments. The first moment lies in an analysis and celebration of the
wage form with regards to its independent character within the capitalist production
process. The second moment is a close reading of the “Fragment on Machines,”
which reveals an understanding for how capitalism can be reversed. Lets start with
the first moment.
The wage-form, Negri claims, conceals the creative aspect of necessary
labour. It does so by only paying workers for their necessary labour while forcing

























































54 GR, 706.
55 GR, 692.


 20

them to work longer than that, i.e. by exploiting them. If the wage-form hides the
creative aspect of labour, it also, claims Negri, hides the subjectivity of the working-
class. (Negri here draws from Marx’s historically independent definition of labour as
the creative process between men and nature in which the former uses all the powers
of their mind and body to make things that they need.) Therefore, the only way to
understand working-class subjectivity, according to Negri, is through an analysis of
the wage-form. So Negri’s goal is twofold: to reveal the creative labour inherent
within alienated labour, which cannot be done without his second aim, namely, the
constitution of a working-class subject.
The emphasis on workers’ subjectivity is vital to Negri’s exposition. By
emphasising that the working-class subject emerges from the constraints of the
capitalist mode of production, he articulates what is absent in Marx’s Capital, namely,
a theory of the subject within the labour process. Negri argues that it is insufficent to
analyse capital from an economic and objective perspective. Only through a reading
of capital from the perspective of the workers can a subversion and inversion of the
value-form take place. Marx introduced an economic and “objective” analysis of
capital with the theory of surplus value. Negri claims that in contrast to that, a
subjective, and therefore a political aspect, is brought in with the theory of the wage-
form.

“The wage, the quantity of necessary labour are not only the bias of capitalist
development, they also determine, in a general way, the fundamental laws. There
lies the creative function of necessary labour, its irresistible upward bias. From
being a condition, the theory of the wage becomes the rule of development. […]
The separation, from the workers’ point of view, is the consolidation of a
historically given reality; it is the productive power of the free subject which
dominates this terrain.”56

The importance of the theory of the wage-form further lies, Negri claims, in
the fact that the wage is independent from the capitalist law of value, thanks to it
taking place within the small-scale circulation of capital. Taking Marx’s distinction of
small- and large-scale circulation, the former one, Negri explains, is the place where
capital is paid out as wages and therefore where necessary labour is produced and
reproduced continuously. The wage-workers therefore reproduce themselves in the

























































56 MBM,133.


 21

same moment as their labour-power is consumed by the capitalist. So the wage-form
is novel in being capable of taking part in large-scale-circulation simultaneously to
existing alongside and independently from it. “This means that the capitalist relation,
exchange and exploitation do not annul the independence of the proletarian
subject.”57 Negri therefore outlines a theory of the working-class subject’s agency
and resistance to capital as inherent within the very production and reproduction of
itself. “Only necessary labour has this capacity to oppose its own resistance to
capitalist valorization, a resistance that is its own conservation and reproduction.”58
The second moment in Negri’s exposition is a close reading of the “Fragment
on Machines,” which is perceived by Negri as the culmination of the antagonistic
relationship between capital and the working-class. The unfolding of the logic of
separation manifests itself, writes Negri, through a radical displacement of the law of
value. This displacement happens in two steps. First, capital’s capability of measuring
itself becomes inverted. Following Marx, Negri writes that a technologically
advanced mode of production, which is the result of the total subsumption of living
labour and therefore of all social forces in society, reduces the amount of necessary
labour-time to a minimum. Negri’s claim is that this reduction of necessary labour
and thus with it, necessary labour-time, makes it impossible for capital to measure its
own value, since there is no longer any measure to measure it with.
The second displacement of the capitalist form of value is the expansion of
productive capital into circulating capital, which is the result of the fact that the
entirety of society has been subsumed to capital. Circulating capital is, as already
mentioned, the place where the production and reproduction of necessary labour, and
thus the working-class subject, takes place. When the labour process has been
tranformed into a scientific knowledge process, the site of production moves out of
the traditional large-scale circulation and into small-scale circulation. So, in the new
mode of production, what before was circulating capital now appears as productive
capital. This implies, says Negri, that production and reproduction become
inseparable. It further suggests, he claims, that the violent logic of separation between
workers and capital has reached an irreversible culmination point in which the
workers can appropriate their own surplus-labour through a process of self-
valorisation. The workers are entirely subsumed to capital, but because of the

























































57 MBM, 134.
58 MBM, 135.


 22

impossibility of measuring their labour – because there is "the evacuation of any
element of measure"59 – space for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour
emerges and “at this moment the impossibility of measuring exploitation modifies the
form of exploitation.”60 This means that the more that individual necessary labour is
reduced by capital, the more the workers can appropriate their own surplus-labour,
which therefore leads to an expansion of the collective necessary labour.

“Capital seeks a continual reduction in necessary labour in order to expand the

proportion of surplus value extorted, but the more it succeeds individually with
workers taken one by one, the more necessary labour benefits the collectivity and
is reappropriated by absorbing the great collective forces that capital would like
to determine purely for its own account. The compression of necessary individual
labour is the expansion of necessary collective labour and it constructs a ‘social
individual’, capable not only of producing but also of enjoying the wealth
produced.”61

When living labour has been turned into capital, the full displacement of the
law of value has taken place, Negri argues. At this point, the theory of value is not
any longer subordinated to the theory of surplus value. “We are here at the
culminating point of a process in which the power relations – rationally established –
regulated and included within the development of capital – are reversed.”62 Labour
turns into a collective process in which the needs of the collective individual
determine the production process. Productive labour and production continue as
within the capitalist process, but they are now determined by the needs of the social
individual which produces and reproduces its own conditions.

“Surplus labour had a uniform aspect in the capitalist project. The wage refigured
the shape of capital. When the wage as it developed became self-valorization and
reappropriation of surplus-labour, it was the end of all rules useful for
development. There is no more profit because labour productivity is no longer
translated into capital. […] Labour productivity is founded and spread socially. It
is both a magma which gathers and recomposes everything, and a network of
streams of enjoyment, of propositions and inventions which spread out across a


























































59 MBM, 147.
60 MBM, 147.
61 MBM, 145.
62 MBM, 148.


 23

 land made fertile by the magma.”63

Productive labour is for Negri an immanent activity arising from the

conditions of capital. When labour is measured with regards to the social individual,
no divisions can be made between productive and circulating capital , and so all
aspects of life must be counted as labour. Negri therefore criticises Marx’s definition
of productive labour, by expanding it beyond the latter’s vocabulary. Negri agrees
with Marx’s definition of productive labour as labour that produces surplus-value.
The problem arises, however, when trying to define where surplus value is created.
Negri claims that when the mode of production have become so advanced that the
entire human mind is subsumed, it will become impossible to distinguish
reproduction from production and therefore productive labour from unproductive
labour. The definition of productive labour must therefore be found in an expanded
concept which includes both reproduction and circulation. When productive labour is
defined in all its social materiality, it will also include the unemployed, the workers’
and the feminists’ movements. Even the “refusal of work”64 will be seen as having “a
productive essence.”65 As I have already pointed out, this means that the making of
art, i.e. artistic labour, is also included in the category of productive labour, with the
enormous creative potential ascribed to it by Negri.




























































63 MBM, 150.
64 MBM, 183.
65 MBM, 183.


 24

2.2. THE LOGIC OF LIMITLESSNESS: CAPITAL’S CAPACITY
FOR EXPANSION

The main and overall problem with Negri’s reading of the “Fragments on Machines”
is the idea that capitalism will reach a culmination point or limit. My suggestion is
that Marx’s short investigation into developed machinery in the Grundrisse is the
exposition of precisely the opposite of that, namely capital’s capacity to continuously
expand itself. “Fragment on Machines” is therefore the manifestation of the real
subsumption of labour to capital.
The claim that capital will reach a culmination point when the mode of
production have subsumed the entirety of society is the result of two wrong
assumptions made by Negri. Before investigating those two aspects I would first like
to look at the similarities between the labour process within the real subsumption of
labour (discussed in my first chapter) and the labour process within “the automatic
system of machinery”66 as described by Marx in the “Fragment on Machines.”
Marx writes the following about the labour process within the real
subsumption of labour:

“The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly

social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour comes into being through co-operation,
division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the
transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences of mechanics,
chemistry etc. […] This entire development of the productive forces of socialized
labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together
with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the
immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of
capital.”67

In this description of the labour process under the real subsumption of labour we find
all the main characteristics of the labour process as described by Marx in the
“Fragment on Machines”. Firstly, the idea that the labour process comes about
through a direct subsumption of living labour and therefore of all social forces in
society. And secondly, the idea that the labour process, taking place within the real

























































66 GR, 692.
67 CA, 1024.


 25

subsumption of labour, as well as the labour process described in the “Fragment on
Machines,” makes labour appear as a collective process and not as the activity of an
individual worker. This, in both cases, further implies that the production process
comes to express the general development of science and technology in society.
Furthermore, and perhaps of more importance in relation to Negri’s exposition, Marx
says that, within the real subsumption of labour, the labour process reduces necessary
labour to a minimum, but only in order to produce a maximum number of cheaper
products. The result of this is, Marx writes, that the production process does not
become controlled by already existing needs. “[T]he quantity of products made is
determined by the constantly increasing scale of production dictated by the mode of
production itself.”68 What Negri saw as the novelty of necessary labour, i.e. its
capability of producing and reproducing itself within the capitalist mode of
production – and therefore the possibility of controlling it – is by Marx seen as
capital’s capacity of continuous expansion, absolutised under the real subsumption of
labour.
However, the fact that the labour process described by Marx in “The
Fragment on Machines” is identical to the labour process taking place within the real
subsumption of labour, such that his “Fragment on Machines” must be seen merely
as a development of his account of the real subsumption of labour, does not mean that
Negri’s theory falls flat. Negri’s theory of the reversal of capitalism is, as we know,
conditioned precisely on the real subsumption of living labour to capital. The main
problem is not, therefore, that Negri conditions the emancipation of the working-class
on the real subsumption of labour to capital, but that he interprets the latter as the
culmination point of and thus the end of capitalism. Negri’s theory is conditioned on
two wrongly made assumptions about the capitalist mode of production. Firstly, that
the technical division of labour does not devalue workers’ labour, and secondly, that
the technology used within the production process is neutral and independent from
the relations of production. Lets start with the question of the technical division of
labour.
The most important distinction between the labour processes under the formal
and real subsumption of labour is the technical division of labour forcefully
introduced with the latter. The technical division of labour, we understand from


























































68 CA, 1037-1038.


 26

Marx’s writings – both from Capital and the Grundrisse – is the fundamental
devaluation of workers’ skills and knowledge. Marx writes that the difference in
skills and knowledge between workers and management was minimal under the
formal subsumption of labour. It is only with the real subsumption of labour that the
technical division and therefore the devaluation of workers’ skills and knowledge
becomes absolutised. This devaluation is expressed when Marx, in the “Fragment on
Machines,” describes how workers’ activity, within the new advanced mode of
production, is “reduced to a minimum”69 and therefore merely appears as the
system’s “conscious linkages.”70 All the scientific and technological development
objectified within the machinery therefore appears as an “alien power”71 to the
workers. This is to do with that the advanced machinery not functions as simple tools
did for workers in earlier labour-processes, i.e. as instruments to improve their
virtuosity and to make them more independent. On the contrary, the transformation of
the means of labour into the automatic system of machinery, controls and regulates
workers’ activities “from all sides”72 and therefore makes them more dependent than
they were before. The virtuosity that in the earlier mode of production belonged to
workers now appears to belong to the means of production.
So, what does the fact – that the real subsumption of labour, described by
Marx, essentially results in the devaluation of workers’ skills – mean in relation to
Negri’s claim that the workers’ creative labour process emerges immanently from the
real subsumption of labour? Lets first look again at Negri’s analyses of the “Fragment
on Machines”.
With the introduction of advanced machinery into the means of production,
necessary labour is reduced to a minimum. This, claims Negri, makes capital
incapable of measuring itself, which results in the law of value reaching a
culmination point where it reverses itself. The consequence of this is that the
production process continues as it did before, with the only difference being that the
workers rather than the capitalist reappropriate the surplus. Negri argues that at this
point labour loses its alienated character and instead turns into a creative process
guided by the needs of the social individual, which has now become a ‘general


























































69 GR, 701.
70 GR, 692.
71 GR, 693.
72 GR, 693.


 27

intellect’.
By only emphasising the creative aspect of the labour process, while
simultaneously claiming that this creative labour process emerges immanently from
within the real subsumption of labour, Negri fundamentally rejects the devaluating
effect that the technical division of labour has on workers within the real subsumption
of labour. John Roberts criticises post-autonomist thinkers in general and Negri and
Hardt specifically for their emphasis on the creative aspect of the labour process.

“The emphasis on resistance internal to the labour process and the creativity of
labour allows the labour process to float free of capital. By insisting on worker
autonomy the existence and reproduction of labour within the capitalist enterprise
is weakened. Hence the very concept of a newly minted workers’ creativity
downgrades the structural and long-term realities of deskilling both external and
internal to immaterial labour.”73

Roberts criticises Empire for giving no account of how this “newly minted workers’
creativity”74 will arise within a labour-process in which workers’ creativity is
downgraded systematically. He argues that, contrary to promoting creativity and
autonomy, the labour process strangles both. He also points out that labour is so
firmly established within the capitalist labour process, that it cannot “float free of
capital.”75 The same critique, I would suggest, can be directed at Negri’s account of
workers’ creativity in his analysis of the “Fragment on Machines,” in which a
fundamental aspect of the labour-process under the capitalist mode of production –
namely, the technical division of labour – is completely ignored.
Roberts opposes claims that the technological and scientific advancements of
the capitalist mode of production increase workers’ creativity and knowledge, and
points out that management theory very often emphasise that contemporary forms of
labour enhance the creativity and knowledge of the workers. It is true, says Roberts,
that average skills increase with the development of technology and science in the
production process.


























































73 IoF, 212.
74 IoF, 212.
75 IoF, 212.


 28

 "Yet what is invariably omitted from this account is that the general increase in
skills are subject to an increasing polarization between workers and management.
Skills become accumulated and refined in various technical, supervisory and
administrative sectors; the mass of workers do not, however, benefit from these
changes. Indeed, they suffer from its consequences as their labour is consistently
stripped of its autonomy and sensuous form."76

This, writes Roberts, is the outcome of Marx’s account of the technical division of
labour, which “destroys and re-routinizes labour in order to create new subcategories
of labour."77 What Negri conceived as the condition for workers' self-valorisation, is,
for Roberts, the devaluation of workers' labour. That is why he claims that the real
subsumption of labour is essentially a process of deskilling of the worker, in which
his or her’s knowledge is appropriated into the technical process to leave him or her
“with an attenuated grasp of the technical processes that he or she simply now
adjusts.” The more advanced the technology introduced into the labour process, the
less skill workers need to operate it.
Roberts strengthens his argument by referring to Harry Braverman who
claims that the deskilling of workers is inherent to the secular development of
capitalism. Braverman claims that the increase in “intellectual”, non-manual labour,
expressed in for example the entertainment- and communication-industries, not has
increased the knowledge and skills of the workers, as the term “intellectual labour”
seems to imply, but on the opposoite, has only “created a huge pool of routinized and
unskilled clerical and service labour.”78 Braverman’s conclusion, writes Roberts, is
that the “occupational and craft heritage of the worker has been systematically
stripped and restripped under capitalism.”79
Roberts makes another important claim about the technical division of labour,
namely that it reveals the fact that “[t]echnology does not simply produce social
relations, [but] it is itself produced by the social relations of capital.” 80He thereby
points out that the technical division of labour comes about as a result of capital’s
subsumption and appropriation of technology. This contradicts Negri’s second
wrongly made assumption, namely, that technology is neutral and independent from

























































76 IoF, 82-83.
77 IoF, 83.
78 IoF, 84.
79 IoF, 84.
80 IoF, 86.


 29

the capitalist logic.
In the “Fragment on Machines,” Marx writes that when necessary productive
labour stops, necessary labour-time stops being the measure of necessary labour and
so capital is therefore “the moving contradiction”81 in that its only measure is
necessary labour-time, and yet it reduces necessary labour-time, expanding surplus
labour-time. "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating
production."82 It would seem, then, that Marx was agreeing with Negri that the
automatic system of machinery would provide the condition for workers’
emancipation, if it weren’t for how Marx continues his exposition.

"Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker
to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as
time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another.”83

Marx here points out that even though the amount of necessary labour is
reduced significantly within a scientific and technologically advanced labour-process,
the labourer works longer than before. The reason is, says Marx, that "the amount of
labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a
minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number
of such objects."84 What Marx indicates here is that capital will always appropriate
the developments in society in favour of its own expansion – it has a capacity of
unceasingly subsuming new elements into the production process. Marx therefore
seems to imply that capital’s ability of unceasingly subsuming new elements into the
production process makes it difficult for workers to appropriate their own surplus-
production. "The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer
than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools."85
Marx further reveals how the technical division of labour is dependent on, and
conditioned by capital’s subsumption of the entirety of society. This subsumption
could at first look positive. “Invention then becomes a business, and the application
of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and


























































81 GR, 706.
82 GR, 77.
83 GR, 701.
84 GR,701.
85 708-709.


 30

solicits it.”86 Negri interprets this is Marx as if the workers now possess their own
means of production. But as Marx points out on several occasions – and this is
crucial:

"But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even
less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is rather, dissection
[Analyse] through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers'
operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a
mechanism can step into their places."87

Marx shows us that the technical division of labour and the development of
technology and science go hand in hand. This is why Roberts claims that alienated
labour cannot merely be transformed by taking it over as Negri suggests, but must be
“transformed by non-heteronomous forms and practices.”88 I will explore Roberts’
account further in the next chapter.

MOBILISATION AND SUBJECTIVITY

Despite the fact that Negri’s reading of “Fragment on Machines” lacks an
understanding of capital’s limitless expansion, specifically under the more advanced
mode of capitalist production, his writing does produce something which
distinguishes him from other post-Marxists such as John Roberts and which
contributes something fundamental to the idea of what artistic labour could be. This
‘something’ is his account of working-class subjectivity, and the capacity of
mobilisation and potential revolution that this evokes. This must be considered in
relation to the political climate Negri works within.
By emphasising the possibility of workers’ self-valorisation, Negri presents us
with a class subject which creates its own conditions. He thereby ascribes to workers
an agency that is completely missing in Marx’s Capital as well as in other post-
Marxists writings. Roberts affirms this when he writes:

“The repossession of subjectivity in labour is the key area which distinguishes

autonomist and post-autonomist writing from both the Frankfurt school and from


























































86 GR, 704.
87 GR, 704.
88 IoF, 86.


 31

 the Bakuninite-Gorz tradition. […] Waged and unwaged workers are not merely
passive victims of technological change, but active agents who are in a position to
contest the control of capital at the point of production.”89

The emphasis on workers’ potential to resist the capitalist production process

that Roberts describes, and which is maybe most developed in Mario Tronti’s
“Strategy of Refusal,”90 belongs to what Hardt distinguishes as the first phase of the
Italian radical autonomia. Significant for this stage, which began in the early 1960s
and ended in the early 1970s, were the factory workers who “constituted the epicentre
of the social movements.”91 The claim of workers’ autonomy from capital was also
vital, “that is, its power to generate and sustain social forms and structures of value
independent of capitalist relations of production, and similarly the potential autonomy
of social forces from the State.”92 These movements must therefore be seen as a
radicalised version of, and in opposition to, the Communist Party in Italy at the time.
The main slogan, Hardt writes, was “the refusal of work,”93 and simply meant refusal
to work within the capitalist mode of production. These cultural and political
experimentations, often expressed as activism, were at many times, Hardt claims,
more radical and longer lasting than, for example, the events in Paris and at Berkeley
College in the U.S. around 1968.
The second stage of the autonomia movement, Hardt writes, took place
between 1973 and 1979. With the post-capitalist economy and its new forms of
labour – largely based on communication and cultural commodities – the focus of
struggle shifted from the factory to the realm of life. “[T]he movements became a
form of life.”94 But it was also within this second phase that the Italian state
repressed “[t]housands of militants”95 who were arrested and tried, so that, by the
early 1980s “the political organization of the social movements was all but
destroyed.”96 Negri, who like many others within the movement was both a theorist
and activist, was imprisoned on political charges from 1979-1989. He was, as Sylvère

























































89 IoF, 210.
90 Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal,” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian
Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), 28-35.
91 Hardt, introduction, 2.
92 Hardt, introduction, 2.
93 Hardt, introduction, 2.
94 Hardt, introduction, 3.
95 Hardt, introduction, 3.
96 Hardt, introduction, 3.


 32

Lotringer indicates, one of the main figures in the movement97 and, as a result, has
since lived in exile in Paris.
It is in this context that we have to read Negri’s lessons on the Grundrisse
made on invitation by Louis Althusser during his exile in Paris in 1978. With a
destroyed movement behind him, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse,
and especially the reading of the “Fragment on Machines,” is an attempt to remobilise
the forces and the hope of the workers’ revolution. We must therefore assume that
Negri’s aim was not to read Capital in the way most in keeping with Marx's original
intention, but in the way that produced the most possible potential for a
remobilisation of forces.
The emphasis on remobilisation rather than on the grief of what had been lost
further distinguishes Negri from several theorists writing on art and culture. Roberts
rightly points this out when he writes that thinking and writing about art since the
early twentieth century have been “grounded in the indivisibility of technical issues
and social questions.”98 Referring to the writings of theorists such as Benjamin
Buchloch, T.J. Clark, Thierry de Deauve and Hal Foster, he argues that this has
resulted in “an overwhelming attachment […] to loss of affect in front of the artwork
at the expense of any deeper understanding of the technical conditions of modern and
contemporary practice.”99 Hardt writes that the asceticism and denial that so many
leftist and cultural movements identify with a revolutionary life is substituted, in
Italian theorists’ writings, with “the collective pursuit of pleasures”100 There is no
ascetic denial within italian theorist writings, Hardt continues, “but rather the
adoption and appropriation of the pleasures of capitalist society as our own,
intensifying them as a shared collective wealth.”101 This is the reason, Hardt claims,
that post-autonomist writers so rarely, as we have seen in Negri too, develop a
critique of the commodity form. “These authors are continually proposing the
impossible as if it were the only reasonable option.”102


























































97 Sylvère Lotringer, introduction to Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los
Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), v-vi.
98 IoF, 5.
99 IoF, 5.
100 Hardt, introduction, 7.
101 Hardt, introduction, 7.
102 Hardt, introduction, 7.


 33

 We have seen how Negri’s conception of productive labour contains all forms
of labour and therefore includes artistic labour within it. If we adopted this definition
of productive labour with all its revolutionary potential, then this would have
fundamental implications for how we think of artistic labour. It too – like all other
forms of labour – will become the very centre of political action. For once artistic
labour is dissolved into the general labour process, it gains a political potential.
The mobilisation effect of Negri’s writing, does not, however, deal with the
fact that it does not offer a proposal on how the capitalist process of production
should be appropriated in such a way that it is transformed, rather than just taken
over.


 34

3. ARTISTIC LABOUR’S CAPACITY OF TRANSFORMING
ALIENATED LABOUR

John Roberts claims, in his already mentioned book The Intangibilities of Form: Skill
and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, that the transformation of alienated to
non-alienated labour, must take place within the labour process itself. He further
proposes that artistic labour “is able to contribute decisively to this process.”103 I
would suggest that there are two fundamentally connected and interdependent reasons
for this to be found in Roberts’ writing. Firstly, according to Roberts, commodities
that are made by artistic labour are not as fully subjected to the capitalist law of value
as other commodities. Secondly – and as a result of that – artistic labour is not
exposed to the technical division of labour in the same way as productive labour is.
Lets start with the question of the law of value.
The reason that artistic commodities not are as subsumed to the capitalist law
of value is because artistic labour has the capacity of controlling and transforming its
materials throughout the entire production process, according to Roberts. Roberts
here appropriates and extends Theodor W. Adorno’s account of the non-reproducible
artwork’s potential for a specific kind of autonomy. Adorno, writes Roberts, did not
condemn reproducibility, for, following Walter Benjamin, he thought that
reproducibility was “what brings modern artistic forms into being, such as the novel
and the cinema.”104 Adorno did however, Roberts points out, criticise reproducibility
and therefore treated “the labour immanent to the [non-reproducible] work of art as a
special case.”105 Adorno’s claim is that, because the non-reproducible artwork is not
as much subject to reproducible forms of production as other commodities are, it
escapes the law of value. As a result, “the labour in the artwork is able to define the
potential critical and liberatory content of art’s labour,”106 by which Adorno refers to
the non-reproducible artwork’s potential to control, and thus to transform, all levels
of the labour process. This, claims Roberts, leads Adorno to ascribe to the non-
reproducible artwork, a specific sensuous autonomy.


























































103 IoF, 86-87.
104 IoF, 29.
105 IoF, 29.
106 IoF, 29.


 35

 “[I]n contrast to the reproducible artwork – the artwork that is potentially exposed
to the law of value – the unreproducible artwork allows all moments of its
production to be determined by the artist’s subjectivity. At no point in the work’s
production is the rationalization of labour determinate of the work’s outcome. For
Adorno, then, the unreproducible work of art encapsulates or concretizes a
particular kind of artistic autonomy, freely sensuous artistic subjectivity. Freely
sensuous labour may appropriate the materials and techniques of determinate,
heteronomous labour, but the making of the work is secured solely through the
autonomous actions of the producer.”107

Roberts’ critique of Adorno lies in the latter’s conception that it is solely the
non-reproducible artwork that can contest the value-form and therefore productive
labour. This, claims Roberts, “leads to a confinement of art’s use-values to
unreproducibility, severely narrowing what the artefactuality of the work of art might
be.”108 One cannot restrict the materials of artistic practices to non-reproducible
mediums. This is because, Roberts argues, that artists always have appropriated
materials from new realms of productive labour, in which new forms of reproducible,
as well as non-reproducible elements, are to be found. More importantly does Roberts
also claim that artists, in order to criticise the value-form and productive labour, in
fact must enter new areas of productive labour and engage with the forms and
elements developed there. This is to do with Roberts conception of that the mode of
reproducibility and the mode of commodity production, under capitalism, are deeply
intertwined.
Under the capitalist value-form, writes Roberts, “social reproduction – the
unceasing production and reproduction of the commodity – and technical
reproducibility (general social technique) are conjoined, one driving the other.”109
This is why Roberts claims that the critique and transformation of productive labour
must include forms of reproducibility. Roberts appropriation of Benjamin – who was
the first to theorise about art in relation to new forms of reproducible technology –
becomes evident when he writes that the most important historical truth that
Benjamin taught us is that “art and general social technique does not stand still.”110
Roberts finds in Benjamin what he thinks Adorno lacked, namely “an understanding

























































107 IoF, 30.
108 IoF, 31.
109 IoF, 15.
110 IoF, 17.


 36

of the interrelations between technology, technicality and artefactuality as a cultural
form.”111 Such that, when art engages with new modes of technology and thus new
forms of productive labour, it must not be seen as the end of art’s sensuous
autonomy, but, on the contrary, as providing the possibility for art to enter “new use-
values and new modes of expression.”112 This is why, as we will see further on,
Roberts celebrates Marcel Duchamp’s found objects, which unashamedly are
products of productive labour. “Defending art, therefore, as a site of struggle against
the value-form cannot be based solely on the artefactual integrity of the
unreproducible artwork.”113
However, Roberts argues that the “freely sensuous”114 artistic autonomy
ascribed by Adorno to the unreproducible artwork, and capable of contesting the
value-form all the way down, must not be abandoned. Therefore, Roberts believes
that the difficult but crucial task for artists today is to restore the autonomy of the
artwork while simultaneously opening it up to new reproducible forms and thus new
forms of productive labour.

“Reproducible forms must embody, or at least recognize the transformative

subjectivity of the artist all the way down, for otherwise such artefacts become
congealed with the heteronomous effects of productive labour. What needs to be
explored, therefore, is how unreproducibility and reproducibility intersect with
each other, transforming the conditions of autonomy in art as a consequence. For
if autonomy cannot be secured solely through unreproducible forms of
artefactuality the struggle for autonomy is not excludable from reproducible
forms.”115

The second reason to Roberts’ assertion that artistic labour has a vital role to
play in the transformation of abstract labour, is that artistic labour, according to
Roberts, not is as subjected to the technical division of labour as productive labour is.
He acknowledges that artistic labour historically has been exposed to the technical
division of labour, and thus, as I have shown in chapter two, therefore also to the
deskilling of labour. “Art follows the historical tendency in production towards the

























































111 IoF, 31.
112 IoF, 32.
113 IoF, 32,
114 IoF, 30.
115 IoF, 32.


 37

general lowering of all round craft skills.”116 However, writes Roberts, artistic labour
is not exposed to the technical division of labour in the same way as productive
labour is, and therefore, does the deskilling of artistic labour, he claims, not imply the
same thing as the deskilling of productive labour. This assertion, made by Roberts is
connected to Adorno’s claim that artistic labour contained in the non-reproducible –
by Roberts expanded to the reproducible – artwork’s capacity to transform its
materials throughout all levels of the production. The fact that Roberts includes
reproducible forms to the autnomous artwork’s transformative potential, is crucial for
his claim that artistic labour not is affected by the technical division of labour in the
same way as productive labour, and is moreover also his real contribution to the
discussion. Because artistic labour opens itself up “to autonomous forms of
transformation […] these forms of transformation will of necessity find their
expression in other skills than craft-based skills: namely, immaterial skills.”117 The
deskilling of artistic labour, such as in the withdrawal of traditional craft-based skills,
makes artistic skills to engage with new skills. By this Roberts means that within
artistic labour does reskilling emerge from deskilling, that is to say, although the
deskilling in artistic labour means that traditional handicraft is gone, the “immaterial
production of contemporary art allows for other, non handcraft, hand-to-eye skills;
the totipotentiality of the hand therefore finds other ways of being skilful.”118 This
stands in sheer contrast to productive labour, in which there is no dialectic movement
between deskilling and reskilling. When productive labour is exposed to deskilling, it
loses its sense of labour as a “sensuous, totalizing practice,”119 while the same
deskilling process of artistic labour leads to new immaterial skills and therefore does
not suffer from a loss of sensuousness.
The fundamental break with certain handicraft skills such as painting and
sculpture within artistic labour is most significantly expressed, Roberts claims, in
Duchamp’s unassisted readymades. The readymade, writes Roberts, began an epochal
shift in artistic labour, because with it, art started to enagage with “the technological
and technical transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century.”120 And
even though Pablo Picasso’s collages and Georges Braque’s papiers collés preceded

























































116 IoF, 87.
117 IoF, 87-88.
118 IoF, 95.
119 IoF, 89.
120 IoF, 24.


 38

Duchamp’s readymades, Roberts claims that the latter are more important, as they left
the sphere of painting completely.
Duchamp’s readymades abandoned the artisanal content of painting and
sculpting. This departure from manual labour, did not however, argues Roberts, end
up with deskilled labour, but on the contrary, made the “artist’s hand able to act on
intellectual decisions in a qualitatively different kind of way.”121 The removal from
painterly and other traditional artistic skills were replaced by Duchamp with a
“productive process in which the nomination and transformation of found objects and
prefabricated materials represents a technical and cognitive readjustment on the part
of the artist to the increasing socialization of labour.”122 In other words, Roberts
claims that Duchamp’s readymades entered new forms of productive labour, which
resulted in the departure from manual artisanal skills, but, more importantly, also in
the employment of immaterial and intellectual skills. It is therefore wrong, Roberts
argues, to say that the readymade completely stripped skills from artistic labour.
“Traditional artistic skills are certainly challenged by the process of deskilling of the
readymade – violently so – but this deskilling is also the point where the artwork is
opened up to other skills and therefore to other use-values.”123
The immateriality of Duchamp’s artistic gesture, Robert explains, operates in
three directions simultaneously. Firstly, it moves artisanal content from its privileged
place within artistic labour. Secondly, it reveals the productive labour inherent in all
forms of artistic labour. And lastly, “it discloses the capacity of commodities to
change their identity through the process of exchange.”124 This is why Duchamp’s
readymades, for Roberts become, the most important examples of the reproducible
artwork’s ability to transform abstracted labour into non-abstracted labour. “For the
readymade not only questions what constitutes the labour of the artist, but brings the
labour of others – ideally at last – into view. Or, to be more precise, non-alienated
and alienated labour are brought into view simultaneously.”125

The fact that Roberts conceives artistic labour as the potential site for the
transformation of alienated labour into non-alienated labour, as expressed in

























































121 IoF, 24.
122 IoF, 23.
123 IoF, 24.
124 IoF, 34.
125 IoF, 24-25.


 39

Duchamp’s readymades, reveals that artistic labour for Roberts is, and always must
be, fundamentally and ontologically different from productive labour. This difference
stems from, not its content, but its capacity of transforming its materials.

“What is purposeful about the labour of art is that it is transformative of its

materials in ways that are non-subsumptive and non-heteronomous, thereby
allowing the subjectivity of the artist to penetrate the materials of artistic labour
all the way down. Subject to the law of value productive labour is unable to
achieve this because the subjectivity of the producer is ‘blocked off’ from the
materials and machinery of production.”126

This distinguishes Roberts from Negri for whom “artistic labour gains the
ontological relevance possessed by all forms of labour”127 and which, in contrast to
Roberts, is connected to the content of specific forms of labour, namely intellectual
and immaterial labour. Although both Negri and Roberts assert that the critique of
productive labour must take place within the labour process itself do they have very
different accounts of how this should happen. The problem with Negri, as I tried to
show in the second chapter, is that he ignores the fact that general social technique is
conjoined with capitalist production, and so fails to offer an account of how general
social technique could be critically appropriated. As a result, alienated labour in
Negri’s theory is in fact never transformed, but only commanded. This is clear in his
analysis of the “Fragment on Machines” where the workers’ self-valorisation is based
simply on taking over the processes of production, rather than transforming them.
When the law of value has been reversed, writes Negri, “[t]he law of surplus value
continues to rule, but in reversed terms”128 by which he refers to that the production
continues as it did during capitalism, with the only difference that surplus-labour now
is reappropriated by the workers. The fact that Negri suggests that the emancipation
from alienated labour can take place by merely getting hold of the means of
production, rather than transforming them, reveals a much more fundamental
difference between Roberts and Negri. Negri bases his theory of workers’ self-
valorisation on the assumption that general social technique is neutral. Roberts on the
other hand, claims that the very reason for artistic labour to transform alienated

























































126 IoF, 87.
127 MM, 22.
128 MBM, 148.


 40

labour, lies in artistic labour’s ability to transform – not merely take over – general
social technique. It is therefore the different views on what role general social
technique should play in the emancipation from alienated labour that fundamentally
distinguishes Negri and Roberts. This does however also leads to an interesting
convergence between what I will call, the “creative worker” and the “depoliticised
artist.”

Duchamp’s readymades are crucial for Roberts’ exposition as they manifest the
transformation of abstract labour into non-abstract labour. They are also important,
writes Roberts, because they “are able to concretize the real crisis of artistic skill and
puncture the retarded technical base of art in this period, and, in doing so, offer a
view of artists as thinkers and constructers.”129 Roberts here refers to his assertion
that Duchamp, along with early avant-gardists in Russia, through their artistic
practices, created a role of the artist identified more with that of an engineer and
fabricator than someone expressing an authentic inner self. As “thinkers and
constructers”130 artists such as Duchamp, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and
Alexander Rodchenko did not only bring general social technique into their practice,
but critically appropriated and transformed it. The problem, according to Roberts, is
that this artistic identity has since the 1960’s dissolved into that of a depoliticised
artist and creative entrepreneur.
Artistic labour has since the late 1960’s, writes Roberts, expanded into a wide
range of digital and non-digital medias. The trouble with many artistic practices since
then, he claims, is that these new forms of media are taken merely as “styles” and are
therefore not consciously integrated into the labouring-process. Artists use all sorts of
technologies and devices without critically transforming them all the way down, in
the way Duchamp did in his readymades. (It is important to note here that Roberts
does not condemn the fact that contemporary artists move between very different
forms of labour and technologies, on the contrary, this is what he celebrates in
Duchamp. His critique of contemporary artists is instead of the way in which they use
these new technologies and medias.) Roberts, therefore, directs a harsh critique
towards the contemporary artist role precisely for its uncritical use of different forms
of labour and technologies. This critique – of the artist role that emerged in the late

























































129 IoF, 26.
130 IoF, 26.


 41

1960’s according to Roberts – becomes even more severe when he considers it in
relation to today’s advanced capitalism. The contemporary form of economy seems in
fact to encourage the artist role so despised by Roberts.

“Many younger artists see their identity as linked to the execution of tasks across
formal, cultural and spatial boundaries. Commitment to one method of production
or form of distribution, one set of cognitive materials, one outlook, is decried.
One of the consequences of this is the emergence of a historically novel tension
between a received (and depoliticized) older notion of the avant-garde critique of
authorship, and the reinvention of the artist as creative entrepreneur (under the
increased glare of celebrity culture.) […] The idea of the artist as an ensemble of
functions, becomes a set of multitasking career opportunities.”131

Lets now go to Negri’s account of the creative worker. The creativity

ascribed to the worker in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, who
emerges in the advanced capitalist mode of production, and who in Negri’s later
writings is connected to labour-forms specifically performed in the creative and
communicative industries, seems similar, in its characteristics, to the role of the artist
that Roberts criticises so much. Negri and Hardt ascribe an enormous potential to
labour forms in which communication and virtual tasks dominate, precisely because
they encourage the worker to be creative, to cooperate and to multitask. The
contemporary artist’s identity that Roberts criticises, seems, therefore, to have
converged with the identity of the “creative worker” so celebrated by Negri and other
post-autonomists. This convergence shows that the idea that the advanced capitalist
mode of production should have created a collective or general intellect is highly
questionable. If the creative worker shares the same characteristics as the de-
politicised artist and the de-politicised artist is deskilled and alienated, then the
collective intellect consists of deskilled alienated workers.
Roberts’ claim that artistic labour has the potential to transform its materials
and therefore is vital to the transformation of alienated labour into non-alienated
labour, points at what Negri’s account of the emancipation from alienated labour
lacks, namely a critical approach towards general social technique. Roberts’ theory
of deskilling and reskilling also reveals something more fundamental about artistic
labour, which is that in order for artistic labour to criticise and transform alienated

























































131 IoF, 11.


 42

labour, it must be visible as artistic labour, i.e. as art. Roberts’ claim that artistic
labour – in order to be able to criticise productive labour – must be visible as artistic
labour, is connected to his conception of artistic labour as transformative of its
materials. This is because, if artistic labour is transformative of its materials and in
that way transforms alienated labour into non alienated labour, in order to show this
transformation and thus in order to direct a critique of productive alienated labour in
general, this artistic labour must distinguish itself from productive labour. The only
way for artistic labour to do this, i.e. to distinguish itself from productive labour, is
by making itself visible as artistic labour, i.e. as art. As soon as artistic labour not
makes itself visible art art, it falls victim to the technical division of labour. This is
why Roberts criticises contemporary artist practices which have, what he calls, “low
artistic visibility.”132 He mentions for example the Danish artist group Superflex
whose artistic practice “favours working on projects that are directly and practically
beneficial to a group, community or client.”133 Roberts also refers to British artist
Gavin Wade, whose artistic practice is similar to that of Superflex’s in that it links art
“to the location and solution of specific material and social problems.”134 The
difficulty with these practices, claims Roberts, is that they dissolve artistic labour
into non-artistic labour. “Art is diffused into an ensemble of non-artistic intellectual
skills and competences.”135 There is therefore, in these practices, no dialectic
between deskilling and reskilling. Instead do they show what happens when artistic
labour dissolves into general social technique. The fact that artistic labour – in order
to criticise productive labour – must be visible as artistic labour, is also the reason to
why Roberts emphasises the importance the hand had in the artistic practices of
artists such as Duchamp as well as other early-avant garde artists. They engaged, he
writes, with general social technique, but because they never let go of the hand’s
subjective control, their practices never completely disintegrated with the techniques
they used.

“The transference of art into general social technique and, thereby, into scientific,
technological or political practice, merely submitted art to the heteronomous
forces it appropriated. This is why the ‘hand’ became a pressing issue for avant-

























































132 IoF, 216.
133 IoF, 215.
134 IoF, 216.
135 IoF, 217.


 43

 garde art in the mid-1920s as the new mass reproductive technologies were
subject to extensive capitalist development. Submitting wholeheartedly to general
social technique meant eventually submitting art to the technical division of
labour.”136

So, what Roberts shows is that artistic labour is vital for the
emancipation from productive alienated labour. And that in order for artistic
labour to perform this emancipation, it must differentiate itself from
productive labour. If artistic labour differentiates itself from productive
labour, then it also, writes Roberts, creates a spectator able to distinguish
between autonomous non-alienated labour and productive alienated labour.
And it is only “on the basis of recognizing this difference that the negation of
labour by those who labour might proceed.”137


























































136 IoF, 218.
137 IoF, 218.


 44

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NB. Abbreviations for footnotes are in bold type

PRIMARY TEXTS

Hardt, Michael., and Antonio Negri. Empire, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2000.

Hardt, Michael., and Paulo Virno, ed. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol I. London: Penguin, 1976. (C)

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 1973. (GR)

Appendix to Capital, Vol I., by Karl Marx, 943-1084. London: Penguin, 1976. (CA)

Negri, Antonio. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. London: Pluto
Press, 1991. (MBM)

Negri, Antonio. “Metamorphoses.” Radical Philosophy 149 (2008):21-25. (MM)

Roberts, John. The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the
Readymade. London:Verso, 2007. (IoF)

SECONDARY TEXTS

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Translated by J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2008.

Bottomore, Tom, Ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1991.

Lotringer, Sylvère. and Christian Marazzi, ed. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics.

Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 2, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 4, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969.

Osborne, Peter. How To Read Marx. London: Granta Books, 2005.

Virno, Paulo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary forms

of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson. Los
Angeles: Semiotext:, 2004.


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ARTICLES

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societes of
security.” Radical Philosophy 149 (2008): 26-32.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labour.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential

Politics, edited by Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt, 132-147. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Osborne, Peter. “Whoever Speaks Of Culture Speaks of Administration As Well:

Disputing Pragmatism in Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies Vol. 20, No 1 (2006):
33-47.

Osborne, Peter. “Marx and The Philosophy of Time.” Radical Philosophy 147
(2008):15-22.

Toscano, Alberto. “The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in
Negri.”, Third Text Vol. 23, Issue 4, (2009): 369–382.

Tronti, Mario. “The Strategy of Refusal.” In Autonomia: Post-Political Politics,

edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, 28-35. Los Angeles: Semiotexte,
2007.


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