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Having reached this point, we can now attempt a summary of some basic methodological assumptions that should help us to reach a partial conclusion and to pose new problems.

To start with, I regard as logically untenable any theory of labour power as a logical construct: an ambiguous and volatile essence, caught in a dichotomy between a tendency to become variable capital (the variable part of organic capital) and a tendency to become working class (i.e. a receptacle for consciousness that derives from the outside, the substance of a new Aristotelian sunolon [whole]). This instrumental and pure logic definition of labour power, which is both abstract and open to manipulation, has, historically speaking, been progressively negated (if I may simplify) through at least three concomitant processes.

 The first process is the advance in the organic composition of capital – which, as it internalizes massively labour power’s relation to the structure of capital, at the same time eliminates from it all measure of proportionality in the relationship between the work done by the individual worker and the level of productivity achieved. Labour power as presented within the labour market as a multiplicity of individual labour powers can now be conceived of only as a totally marginal phenomenon.

 The second process, which takes the development of the organic composition of capital beyond the scope of the single firm and goes beyond its phenomenological appearance to see it as the realization of the subsumption of social labour under collective capital, has shown labour power to be a social entity. That which is marginalized as an individual becomes transformed, at the social level, into mobility, into an equivalence of abstract labour, into a global potentiality that has in it that generalized social knowledge that is now an essential condition of production.

 The third process, concomitant with those of individual marginalization and collective socialization, has brought about a conjunction between (a) the refusal of labour power to make itself available as a commodity (I see this as the effect of individual marginalization and of the collapse of any relationship between ‘job’ and ‘skill’) and (b) the socialization of this mode of class behaviour. I designate this as a ‘third’ process and consider it both innovative and conceptually very rich, since the coming together of individual marginalization and collective socialization is no simple process of addition. Rather it is a historical process, which combines material elements and becomes at the same time subjectivized – in the sense that historical experience becomes transformed into irreversible qualities, into a second nature. Through the genesis of this process, new subjective forces make their appearance.

As a result of these processes, it should now be clear that labour power, at this level of subsumption of social labour by capital, so far from presenting itself as an intermediate entity, suspended between being a function of variable capital and becoming working class, now presents itself as a social subject: a subject that has internalized at the social level its refusal to be a commodity.

At the political and social level, this subject presents a complete materialization of consciousness within the structures of its own existence. Class consciousness, in other words, comes neither from the outside nor from afar: it must be seen as completely internal to a fact, a thing of class composition. The concept of class composition, which was developed originally through the analysis of the mass worker – as a means of classifying changes in the nature of labour power and as a critique of purely logical and economistic characterizations of these changes – can now be updated as a historico-political, subjective social definition of labour power. In view of this, we can appreciate the importance of the theoretical current that developed through the analysis of the mass worker, and above all we can appreciate how the specific antagonistic subjectivity of this class protagonist contributed, through its struggles, to going beyond and overcoming the limitations of the original theoretical conception. It seems to me that the mythical term ‘proletariat’ has been given a historical dimension and has become founded as a specific material reality through the development of this theoretical approach.

Major consequences derive from all this. First, there is a demystification of a number of concepts and practices existing within the traditions of the labour movement. Secondly, in my opinion, important consequences (and, more particularly, problems) arise at the strictly theoretical level, in other words relating to our conceptions of work and communism. Thirdly, not to be underestimated in their importance, we also find indications of method.

Let us take the first point. This social labour power that exists as a political reality, this social worker, this proletariat, embraces within itself so many dimensions, both intensive and extensive, as to render many categories obsolete. In other words, proletarian antagonism (within real subsumption) posits itself on the one hand, intensively, as an irreversibility of the given level of needs that has been arrived at, and on the other hand, extensively, as a potentiality of action, as a capacity to extend action across the entire span of the working day. If we want a tighter conceptual definition, we might say that this socialized labour power not only (a) dissolves any possibility for capitalism to consider it as a commodity, as the variable component of capitalist command for exploitation, but also (b) denies capitalism any possibility of transforming necessary labour into wage and surplus value (absolute or relative) into profit. Clearly profit and wage continue to exist, but they exist only as quantities regulated by a relation of power – a relation of forces that no longer admits the threefold partition of the working day into necessary labour time, surplus labour time, and free time or reproduction time. We now have a labour power that is both social and subjective, that recognizes the value partition of the working day only as a system of command, which capital may or may not succeed in imposing over and against the continuous flow of labour power within the working day. The conditions for the extraction of surplus value now exist only in the form of a general social relation. Profit and the wage become forms of the division of a value content that no longer relates to any specific mechanisms of exploitation other than the specific asymmetry of the relationship of command within society. Capital has the form and substance of profit, as an average, a mediety of command; labour power has the form and the substance of the wage, but in no way can a ‘natural rate’ be said to exist between the two of them. In other words, the mechanism of transformation and mediation that characterizes the Marxian genesis of these concepts has now reached its point of fullest maturity. Exploitation consists in command. It is violence against the antagonism of social subjects that are fighting for liberation.

As a consequence, the marketing of labour power is no longer an undertaking for minions and sycophants: if anything, the marketing of labour power today has become a totally political operation. This consists in extending Marx’s ‘war’ between capitalism’s tendency towards the limitless working day and the tendency of the proletariat to limit (to nil, if possible) the provision of labour power, and in transforming that ‘war’ into formalized and viable political procedures, which extend from the concrete labour process (within production and reproduction) to the overall scenario of the organization of command – that is, to political and state forms of the management of the economy, management of the labour market, of public spending, and so on. Only in this political dimension can success or failure in the marketing of labour power now be gauged.

All of this is another way of saying that, at our given level of development, the old dialectic of labour power [la dialettica della forza lavoro] within and against capital is now played out, has become obsolete, is only of archaeological interest. If there exists any real negotiation or bargaining, this can no longer be encompassed by trade union forms of bargaining or other such antique practices. In other words, the dualism of power is now the norm. The working day can be described only in terms of an active dualism of power wherein the old dialectic of unity, transcendence and equilibrium is obsolete. In making this point I need only refer, by way of example, to the inadequacy of the most normal, everyday and (as it often seems) obvious institutional form of the traditional labour movement: the trade union.

Far more dangerous, as regards the potential mystification of our own concept, rediscovered and reconstructed, of the proletariat, are those ideologies that take labour power as a material that can be led to class consciousness (although they are also more ineffective, given the historical experience of ‘realized socialism’ in the east). To turn labour power into what? To transmute exploited labour into liberated labour, via the magic wand of a mystical ‘political consciousness’, in other words of its vanguard representatives. What has changed in reality? Nothing – only words. The dialectic of labour functions here perfectly. The word ‘labour’ replaces the word ‘capital’: the system remains the same. The working day is not touched. Time measure continues to be the regulative function of command and of partition or division. No – the new (and even the old?) concept of the proletariat really cannot accept these mystifications. The truth is that, from the proletarian point of view, the process of real subsumption brings about such a massive intensification of the composition of the working class, and such an extension of its potentiality, as to eliminate any dualism between being and consciousness, any isolation of single aspects within it. The proletariat acts directly over the entire span of the social working day. Production and reproduction are now, in parallel and on equal terms, the spheres of action proper and adequate to the reality of labour power. Consciousness is an attribute, entirely within and of its material structure.

And now let’s look at work, labour. Here we come to the second set of consequences deriving from our political concept of socialized labour power, of composition (i.e. of the social worker). Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of the human being, inasmuch as the human being is productive activity. But capital is real – while human essence is only a dream. The only human essence of labour that approximates to the concreteness of capital is the refusal of work – or rather that kind of productivity that, for capital, is purely negative – because, while it represents a sine qua non of production, capital nonetheless tends to reduce it, and, precisely insofar as it is an essence of human nature, to eliminate it from production. Human labour, when posited as proletarian reality, is a negative element in capitalist production. Of course, it is true to say that only labour produces. But it is also true that bosses are happy with production only when the labour in it is totally under command: command is sadistic, it requires the presence of human labour, but only in order then to deny it, to nullify it. This process has functioned in the past as the classic steely scourge of capitalist domination – until and unless labour power presents itself as a social subject. In other words we have here, within the intensity and extensity of the composition of the proletarian subject, a negative form of labour, which has such broad dimensions and is so articulated as to render problematical its very definition as ‘negative’. We often refer to it as ‘alternative’, ‘self-valorizing’ and so on. But I prefer to continue calling it ‘negative labour’, not in order to flirt with the language of crisis but simply because I do not yet feel the strength to be able to call it liberated work (i.e. work that is wholly positive). It is difficult to describe any work as ‘positive’ so long as it is contained within capital, such is the quantity of death and pain that it bears within it. For us to call working-class and proletarian work ‘positive’ and socially useful, we would have to be capable – the proletarian subject in its overall complexity would have to be capable – of the statement in prefigurative terms of its alternative form of production. We would require a vision of how its own productive potential could unfold. (Only certain sectors of the proletariat within the area of reproduction – the feminist movement chief among them – have so far proved capable of producing a positive image of forms of work that could be proletarian, alternative and revolutionary.) But the fact that we cannot spell it out does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. It exists as a murmuring among the proletariat. Negative work, amid the whispers of everyday life and the noise and shouting of the struggle, is beginning to gain a general form of expression. What I think needs stressing particularly is the material character of negative work, its institutionality. The concept of proletariat is becoming an institutional reality, a practical emergence – not lifeless, but living; a different conception of time; a universality held within that second nature, entirely factitious (in etymological terms, verum ipsum factum); an institutionality, thus, that seeks order and a systematization of its own values. The levels, the spaces of this experience are truly thousand-fold. But they all have a centripetal impulse, which increases according to the extent of their liberty, their expansivity. If we are to translate the word ‘communism’ into present-day language, then perhaps it means reinforcing and solidifying this proletarian institutionality and developing its potential contents.

However, for the moment we still require a long period of clarification, of study, and of specific struggles. The method remains tactical. Methodological consequences derive from our definition of the proletarian subject as antagonism within realized subsumption – and they derive, above all, from our understanding of the various aspects of the transition from mass worker to socialized labour power, to the social worker. Within this transition, simultaneously with the breakdown of the regulatory principles of capitalist development (the market, value, the division between production and reproduction etc.), there also unfolds the impossibility of any homogeneous and unified determination not only of the overall design of development, but particularly of its categories, its norms. When the concept of labour power is realized within a socialized and subjectified class composition – and this takes place precisely at the highest point of unity from capital’s viewpoint (real subsumption) – then all the established terms of scientific argument break down. They become blocked, definitively non-recuperable for the old dialectical logic of unity and transcendence. The only way in which any scientific category, whether in logic or in ethics, in politics or in political economy, can constitute itself as a norm is as a negotiated settlement: as a formalization and balancing of opposing forces – in the human sciences, as a moment of voluntary agreement. It is clear that nothing of what defined the old conception of scientific norms is present here. What we have instead, exclusively, is the logical results brought about by the development of class composition – subsumption under capital realized in the form of permanent crisis. What we are presented with is the positive emergence of negative labour as an institutionalized counterpower, acting against work that is subsumed within capital. While labour subsumed under capital corresponded to a logic of unity, of command, and of its transcendence, negative labour produces instead a logic based on separateness – a logic that operates entirely within, is endogenous to, that separateness. The institutionalized forms now assumed by labour power as a separate entity also represent its deinstitutionalization in relation to the present framework of economy and politics, to capital and the state. This relation is precisely a negative one and, inasmuch as negative labour has the power and possibility of imposing it on the system, the only unifying logic that remains is one of duality, twosidedness: a logic that is ephemeral, reduced to mere semblance. In reality it can represent only a moment in a historical phase of crisis, in which the point of reference for all rationality or intelligibility is being rapidly shifted towards a fully socialized labour power, the new class subject, the ‘social worker’.

So I have covered, in outline, some aspects of the formation of labour power into a social subject. A very rich phenomenology could be provided for this transformation, starting from the mass worker and the history of the mass worker’s struggles. I think that such an account would confirm the theoretical and methodological assumptions I have outlined here.

In conclusion, however, I would stress that, so far, this is only a half-way stage in the analysis. For, if it is true that every scientific category concerning the relation of capital can now be understood only within a dualistic matrix, then a further logical problem arises: the question of the multiplicity and mobility of the forms of this transformation of the class subject, and how this multiformity can be grasped within a mature political concept of labour power – in other words, how we can develop a theory of the new institutionality of the proletariat in its multiple matrices. But this will have to wait for another occasion.