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So let us return to the moment when the pressure of this new spontaneity (that is, the spontaneous – but, as in the paradox I have described, both structural and structured – forms of expression of the new class composition, i.e. of the mass worker) brings about a crisis in the means of capitalist control over the production and reproduction of commodities.

I would suggest that this moment can be located chronologically within the decade 1960–1970. In that period, strikes and struggles created an upheaval within the existing framework of development, inducing a major series of critical phenomena (crises of capitalist control), of which the following seem to be the most important:

1 The mass worker set in motion a mobility within the labour market. The subversive characteristics of this mobility appear to consist in an uncontrollable increase in the speed of flow and turnover of demands, and at the same time in a rigid and homogeneous escalation of those demands. If we include in our definition of the mass worker the fact that the mass worker represents a certain qualitative solidification of abstract labour (which is another way of saying a high level of subjective awareness of abstract labour), then these mobility-related phenomena reveal simply the centripetal potential of abstract labour (towards averageness, mediety) in a framework of mass production in modern capitalism. And this might be consistent with development. But, instead, the forms and modes in which the mobility (subjectivity) of the mass worker expressed itself threw capitalist development out of proportion, subjected it to intolerable accelerations, and in particular confronted it with the quality of this very composition – those historical differences and divisions of sex, age, culture, and so on that were now tending towards a deeply rooted political homogeneity. Mobility of abstract labour equals tendency for subjects and for struggles to unify.

2 On the other hand, in a complementary process, the mass worker set in motion, both in individual factories and in the productive fabric of the metropolis, a downward rigidity of expectations and wage demands. This in itself (the demand for ‘parity’) became a subversive force. Drives towards egalitarianism served to reinforce this rigidity: we saw the collapse of all – or virtually all – the weaponry of division in the factory (piecework, employers’ unilateral control of timings of the labour process, internal mobility, etc.) and of the hierarchy that controls the labour process and the organization of production. In this period, sackings – together with all the other various forms of exclusion and marginalization – were powerfully contested, resisted, and in large part blocked. Furthermore, the overall rigidity of the class brought about a reduction in effective labour time; it also provided defence and backup for individual experiences of resistance to work or refusal of work. The wage struggle, in both its qualitative and quantitative aspects, became a powerful independent variable of development: a kind of economic–political dual power that came into existence. (In some instances we find this registered in factory legislation – most notably in Italy, for example.) Rigidity of abstract labour equals qualitative consolidation of the previously mentioned unification of subjects and of struggles.

3 Third, the social mobility and the political and wage rigidity of the social worker were also articulated within the sphere of circulation. But, for the mass worker, circulation means a radical change in the relation between daily work time and non-work time. We were not yet at the point where the latter had hegemony over the former. However, this was a phase in which the social relation of production (the relation between production and reproduction) was an area of powerful contestation. Without succeeding in fully controlling and carrying through this leap in the class struggle, mass workers nevertheless spread the infection of their subjective behaviour into the fabric of proletarian society. First – just to take one example – although not yet at the point of directly contesting the ‘Oedipal wage’ (in other words, the wage paid for the male worker’s domination over his family), the mass worker nonetheless induced an awareness of the urgent need for new wage forms in the management and development of the social sphere – new wage forms likely to have a decisive and dissolving effect on the unified family wage and to liberate new labour power at an extremely high level of needs. The mass worker was an active factor in the circulation of working-class objectives and in propagating the equality implicit in abstract labour. As such, the mass worker induced subversive effects within society that tended to negate the division between productive and reproductive labour, and also to alter the established proportion between them. The circulation of the forms of behaviour of the mass worker was an extension of the unification of the subjects and of the struggles.

4 Finally, I have to stress that it is only by moving to a political expression that the series of subversive conditions implicit in the existence of the mass worker could be further advanced. The concept of the mass worker had an existence that was purely relative; the fact that mass workers were the point of a class evolution that had not yet been fully realized often permitted the surreptitious reintroduction of old political concepts and practices, such as the notion of vanguard and mass, and thus permitted the re-emergence of party representation and the mirroring of past forms. This political inadequacy results from precisely the social indeterminateness of the figure of the mass worker. We should never underestimate this limitation but, if we look beyond it, we can see that a framework of new values was beginning to take shape – ideas of freedom to match the fact of mobility; ideas of community, as an aspect of the rigidity mentioned; ideas of new life and universality, as a synthesis of people’s relation to reproduction and liberated time. This framework of new values was incipient, was still dawning, but was nonetheless efficacious, because it existed at a mass level.

At this point the capitalist crisis in the management of this labour power, with all its strength and richness, became decisive. Capital goes into crisis every time labour power transmutes to become working class – and by ‘working class’ I mean a level of composition incompatible with command, at a given historical level of maturity of the productive forces. (It is evident that consciousness cannot be defined outside this relation; so it is possible to find extremely high levels of consciousness that remain totally ineffective and, on the other hand, spontaneous levels of consciousness that are powerfully effective in revolutionary terms.) As I say, every time when labour power effects a revolutionary transformation in its composition and becomes working class, at that point capital enters relations of crisis and has only one weapon with which to respond: restructuring – an attempt to attack and transform class composition. In other words, for capital, restructuring is a political, economic and technological mechanism aimed at the enforced reduction of the working class to labour power. To put it more correctly, capital aims to reduce the intensity of the political composition of the class.

At this point, the problem becomes specific again. How did capital respond to the crisis in relations of production that was induced by the class offensive of the mass worker? How was restructuring articulated at this level of political composition of the class and its struggles? What happened after the 1960s?

It is not hard to identify and describe some major elements of the capitalist response. Obviously, the notes that follow are very partial and indicative. They limit themselves to questions of class relations in the sphere of production. To deal adequately with the restructuring of labour power, I would really have to consider two fundamental shifts in imperialist development in the early 1970s: the freeing of the dollar from gold parity (1971) and the energy crisis of 1973–74. There is no space to deal with them here, and so the argument, as well as being partial and indicative, is frankly insufficient. However, I would ask you to trust the author and believe me when I say that I have given a lot of thought to these other fundamental determinations of the overall framework. These, in my opinion, are not contradictory with the phenomena that are now studied at the level of production and reproduction. Rather they present an overdetermination, an extension and a deepening of the logic which lies at the root of these phenomena.

So let’s return to my initial question, to the analysis of the groundwork of capitalist restructuring. Let’s begin by looking at mobility. In my opinion, as regards mobility, capital was already taking into account developments in the composition of the mass worker and was in fact acting on their tendency to become realized, in order to throw the working class back to the position of being labour power. While the composition of the mass worker from the 1960s onwards tended, via mobility, towards a unification in general of potential abstract labour, capital’s restructuring project effectively grasps the social tendency towards abstract labour. It is against this abstract labour that capital exercises its capacity to repress, to fragment and to introduce hierarchical division. Capital does not mobilize against abstract labour and the social dimension it assumes, but against the political unification that takes place at this level. Capital assumes subsumption of labour (abstraction and socialization) as a process that has been realized. Experiments in job design, segmentation of the labour market, policies of regrading, reforms of methodologies of command within production cooperation, and so on – all this became fundamental. A restless, practical process of trial and error was now set in motion, aimed at destroying any possibility of proletarian unification. If we understand mobility as a tendency towards freedom, as a definition of time that is alternative to commanded time within the classic working day – and if we assume that from now on, in a parallel movement, it becomes impossible for capital to establish any fixed ‘reserve army’ of labour – then we understand why, in political and economic terms, it is so urgent for capital somehow to fix this labour power (the first, spontaneous and structural manifestation of an abstract labour that has become subjectively realized) within mobility and via mobility. We have on the one hand class struggles within and against capital’s system and, on the other, capital struggles within and against the new composition: within its mobility, its socialization, its abstraction, and against the subjective attitudes which these elements engender. All manpower and job design interventions are to be understood as policies that learn from the progress of abstract labour towards its social unification: they intervene in order to block further development of its subversive potential.

Capital’s reaction against the rigidity evident in the composition of the mass worker was even more rigorous. This is because in this area mystification is harder to achieve. Policies aimed at segmenting the labour market (which are posited as ‘positive’, as against the ‘negative’ of mobility of abstract labour) tend to produce a balkanization of the labour market and, above all, important new effects of marginalization: marginalization in the form of political blackmail, repression and degeneration of values – much more than the familiar blackmail of poverty. I have said that the rigidity in the forms of behaviour of the mass worker (particularly on the wages front) expressed an essence that was qualitative – a complex of needs that became consolidated as power. Capital’s problem was how to defuse this power, quantitatively and qualitatively.

Thus, on the one hand, we have seen the promotion of various forms of diffuse labour –the conscious shifting of productive functions not tied to extremely high degrees of organic composition of capital towards the peripheries of metropolitan areas: this is the quantitative response, of scale and size. (The scale of this project is multinational and should be understood against the backdrop of the energy crisis.) On the other hand, capital has attacked the problem of qualitative rigidity and has planned for one of two solutions: it must be either corporatized or ghettoized. This means on the one hand a system of wage hierarchies, based on either simulated participation in development or regimentation within development, and on the other hand marginalization and isolation. On this terrain – a terrain that the experience of the struggles of the mass workers had revealed as strongly characterized by political values – capitalism’s action of restructuring has often made direct use of legal instruments. It has regarded the boundary between legality and extralegality in working-class behaviours as a question subordinate to the overall restoration of social hierarchy. Not even this is new – as we know, it has always been the case – and Marx, in his analysis of the working day, makes the point several times. Law and the regulation of the working day are linked by a substantial umbilical cord. If the organization of the working day is socially diffuse, then sanctions, penalties, fines and so on will be entrusted to the competence of penal law.

Capital also acted against the way in which the mass worker had made use of circulation – in other words, of the increasingly tight links between production and reproduction. Restructuring once again adopted the method of displacement: capital takes as given or realized the tendency set in motion by working-class struggles, it subsumes its behaviours (i.e. the awareness of the circularity between production time and reproduction time) and begins working on how to control this situation. The welfare state is the principal level geared to synchronizing this relationship. The benefits of the welfare state are the fruit of struggles, the counterpower. But the specific application of restructuring aims to use welfare in order to control, to articulate command via budgetary manoeuvrings. ‘Public spending cuts’ are not a negation of the welfare state; rather they reorganize it in terms of productivity and repression. If subsequently proletarian action within this network of control continues to produce breakdown and to introduce blockages and disproportions, then capital’s insistence on control reaches fever pitch. The transition to the internal warfare state represents the corresponding overdetermination of the crisis of the welfare state. But it is important to stress once again capital’s capacity for displacement. The restructuring that has followed the impact of the mass worker’s struggles and the tendencies that the mass worker has instilled within the general framework of class power relations are geared to match a labour power that exists as completely socialized – whether it exists or potentially exists is not important. Capital is forced into anticipation. However, marginalization is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production; expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production – this is the most that capital’s action of restructuring can hope to achieve. It does not succeed in bringing about a restoration of the status quo, and in the struggle against the mass worker it is likely to assist in the even more compact formation of a completely socialized labour power. There is much craftiness of proletarian reasoning in all this!

Things become even clearer when we come to the fourth area in which capital’s activity of restructuring has to prove itself and be proven: the terrain of politics. Here every attempt at mystification – this seems to me the most interesting aspect – is forced to assume the complete socialization of labour power as normal, as a fact of life, a necessary precondition of any action against proletarian antagonism. In other words, as many writers now accept, the only, remote possibility of mystifying (controlling, commanding etc.) struggles is conditional on an advancement of the terms in which the problem is considered: on an approach to the problem at the level of policies of capitalist command that see its enemy subject in proletarian society as a whole. Capital relates to the phase of real subsumption as antagonism at the highest level. Capitalist analyses of command move from this awareness to develop two possible lines of approach. The first, which I would call ‘empirical’, regards social labour power as a purely economic subject, and therefore locates the necessary, control-oriented manoeuvrings within a continuous trial-and-error process of redistribution and reallocation of income – for example consumerist objectives and inflationary measures. The other, which I call ‘systemic’, is more refined. It assumes that the empirical policies pursued thus far have resolved nothing. Thus the only way of ensuring the effective exercise of command, with an ongoing reduction of the complexity of class conflict, is to maintain command over systemic information and circulation, to maintain a pre-ordered mechanism of planning and balancing inputs and outputs. At this level, capital’s science and practice of command reveal themselves as a set of techniques for analysing the social sphere – and as an undoubtedly involuntary recognition of the immediate sociality, structure and density of labour power.

I consider it important to understand these fundamental changes and to highlight their conceptual character. Thus I define restructuring as a parenthesis within the evolving process of the composition of the working class. Obviously, this is a necessary parenthesis: the interaction of productive forces (capital and the working class) is in no sense illusory. But at the same time I should stress that, within this process, the motor force of working-class struggles is fundamental, as are the intensity of their composition and the emergence of abstract labour as a social quality and as a unifying factor within production (and reproduction). As we used to say, capital’s great function is to create the conditions for its own destruction. This is still the case. Thus we must recognize that, in the restructuring process currently under way, these critical conditions of capitalist development are still respected. Obviously, such a recognition is possible only if our theory is up to it. And one of the fundamentals of an adequate theory is to have a concept of labour power that is not conceptually indiscriminate but that is historically and politically pregnant, is continually and materially in tune with class consciousness – in other words, with degrees of struggle and of capacity to effect change that come increasingly close to the classic concept of proletariat. However, I feel that it is still necessary to live through that ambiguity of production and relations of production, and the way they are always being newly determined.