11.04.2003 Harman-Hardt Debate: The Working Class or the Multitude?
Initial Statement: Michael Hardt
Somehow Chris has inspired me. Im not one to go quoting Marx all the time. I usually I say dont lets made Marx into a Church. Lets not treat it as a bible. Lets learn from Marx, learn from others, also learn from ourselves.
But Chris has inspired me. His arguments are in fact against Marxism. So I might as well refer to them.
Let me start then with one falsity. It seems to be as SWP speciality about our book to quote something and then misread it purposefully. But luckily a lot of you will have read the book so you know.
The point which Chris quoted did not say that the industrial working class had disappeared. What Chris read out was that the industrial working class has been displaced from its privileged position. Let me explain what I mean by this so that we can clarify things. I agree with the wonderful quantity of data. The question is rather: what is the hegemonic position within labour? In other words in a capitalist economy there is one kind of labour, one form of labour, one sector of labour that acts in a hegemonic way over the others.
Now remember, in Marxs time, what Marx said was that the industrial working class exercised hegemony over the other forms of labour, not in quantitative terms. When Marx was writing the industrial working class was very small in England. In the world generally it was miniscule. Most of the workers were in agriculture, in mining, in primary production. The industrial working class exerted a hegemony over the others. What did that mean? It meant it had the power to transform other forms of labour. Other forms of labour had to become more like it. Agricultural work had to industrialised, mining had to industrialise, society itself had to industrialise. And that was the hegemony of industrial labour over other forms of labour.
We are not talking in quantitative terms. We are talking in qualitative terms because that economic sector in Marxs time was extremely small.
What Toni and I say, in a perfectly Marxist fashion, is that today we have passed form the hegemony of industrial labour to the hegemony of what we call immaterial labour under which we include a variety of activities all of which produce an immaterial product. The labour itself is material but it produces an immaterial product, like an affect or a feeling. We can say fast food workers not only produce something material but that also produce an affect, service with a smile, they create a sense of well being. Thats a kind of immaterial labour, we say. Also the production of images, the production of ideas, the production of knowledges, happens throughout the economy at high and low levels. But its not, as Chris aptly said, its not the quantity that predominates in the world economy. Absolutely not. Its quantitatively minor. An yet it exerts a hegemony over the field of labour. So in exactly the passage Chris quoted - Im grateful for that - we talk not about the disappearance of the working class, but of the working class being displaced from its privileged position.
What this hegemony does do is define the global division of labour. Certain kinds of immaterial labour are isolated in certain geographical zones in the world and it is important to recognise those differences. Industrial labour is accumulated in some places, agricultural labour in others, and there differences between those different kinds of labour, a definite hierarchy.
Now let me talk about the working class. Chris is insistent about the priority of the industrial working class as an organisational force and the need for it to exercise political hegemony over other forms of labour.
It seems to me that the concept of working class has come to be - it does not have to be but it has come to be in our language - and exclusionary and corporatist concept. Let me talk abbot some of the exclusion that we have come to understand in our common usage the concept of working class. Chris has underlined this at great length that the concept of working class has come to mean for us the industrial working class.
Whos excluded by that? Certainly unwaged labour is excluded from that. Unwaged domestic labour carried out by women is not part of the working class under this definition. They are excluded. According to what Chris says, there struggles are not important, or rather there struggles are unrecognisable, they cannot be used, they have to unite under the industrial working class.
There is also an exclusion of the poor, of unemployed. They are not part of the working class. They can be threat to the working class. They have to kept out of the political movement. Marxs own writings about the lumpenproletariat - at what I consider unfortunate moments in Marxs writings - do coincide with Chriss point.
So unpaid domestic labour is excluded, the poor are excluded. The peasantry also is excluded. There is long tradition of this in Marxist and socialist thought. It is in many senses an unfortunate tradition. The claim was in the 19th century among Marx and Engels that the peasantry and the industrial working class did not have common conditions of labour and that they could not unite politically. The peasantry, he said, because of their incommunicability, their dispersion, could not unite politically, could not act politically. At best - this is the very bad tradition on our shoulders - at best the peasantry can act under the guidance of the industrial working class.
The notion of the working class excludes agricultural workers. Thats another exclusion I want to point to.
What Chris said, and there is a tradition of this, but it is a tradition I want to argue against, is that the struggles of those who are excluded from the working class must be subordinated to the struggles of the working class. There is a long tradition of this.
But we see many movements today that are very properly challenging this. The best examples for me being the Zapatistas, the Sin Tierra and the piqueteros, which are not only objecting to that tradition, the political division, but also demonstrating the utility of organising across that division, of ignoring that division in a way of expanding the notion. The notion of the multitude is an attempt to reconceive for today the concept of the proletariat rather than that of the working class. Because the working class has become an exclusionary concept, whereas proletariat means, at least in its original formulation, all of those whose labour is employed by capital, those who are waged and those who are unwaged, those who work in the fields and those who work in the factories. So this expansion of the notion of the proletariat is what we try to capture with the notion of the multitude.
It implies, and I can come back to this later, a radical critique of the way most labour unions are organised today, in a corporatist way. Our critique is an attack on the corporatist practices of the unions and an expansion of the political mobilisation of those outside those privileged sectors of the working class, privileged in a series of senses.
I want to give a more philosophical conception of the multitude, which I think is useful in this context.
Like I say, Toni and I see multitude as a class concept, as a way of seeing class and its political uses. Generally, people accept the notion there are two conceptions of class. There is one which is usually associated with Marxs own work which we think of as the unitary model of class. This is grounded in Marxs work when he continually talked in his work about the tendency in capitalist society for a reduction of class differences so as to tend to a two class model of capitalism, the class of those with nothing to sell but their labour power, the proletariat, and the capitalist class. So Marx talks about the reduction to the two class, or unitary model, with one class of labour.
We traditionally have as an alternative to that in the various academic and intellectual notions of class what is thought of as a liberal model in which is about a pluralism of classes. This liberal model says there is not just one category of labour but rather there is a variety of classes in society, none of which has priority over the other. This is the liberal pluralistic model as opposed to Marxs unitary model.
It seems to me that both of these concepts of class are correct. We should both think of labour by this unitary model and simultaneously by the plurality of classes model.
If we look at Marxs work we find, especially in historical writings, he talks about a great variety of classes. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx talks about numerous classes of capital. He does not just talk about a unitary class of labour and a unitary class of capital.
What is going on here is that Marxs unitary model of labour can either be seen as a tendency - that there are many classes, but that the tendency is towards a single class of labour. Or another way of seeing it is that he sees the single class as a political project. Its not that today there is a single class of labour, but that it could be our political project to create a commonality of labour and to recognise that commonality in political terms. That I think is the way we understand this term the multitude.
It is not that there are two ways of thinking about it: either there is one class of labour or there is a plurality in a liberal sense. It is not that there is one struggle or there are many struggles. Rather, and this is what the term multitude is trying to deal with, we have to understand the potential commonality of various classes of labour and also the potential commonality of struggles. They remain different, but they recognise their commonality.
Let me give you one more, even more philosophical point. Let me explain how we see multitude in the history of the concepts of European philosophy.
Let me make a few contrasts and Ill then try to give you what that means in terms of political organisation.
First5 of all its important for us to distinguish the concept of the multitude from the concept of the people. What we mean is that the concept of the people has traditionally been used in political philosophy as unitary concept. In other words, the concept of the people is of a single thing abstracted from the population, and by unitary is meant self identical. National identity comes under that category.
The concept of the multitude is always internally differentiated. The multitude is a plurality. That is the difference between the people and the multitude. The people is one, the multitude is many.
It is important to distinguish the multitude from a series of other concepts - the masses, the crowd, the rabble. All of these are social multiplicities, are pluralities. But they are passive, they cannot act on their own. The mob and the masses not only can be guided, they have to be guided, the need an external force that leads. By contrast, the multitude acts on is own, it is able to act in its own name, it refuses leadership.
For me the definition of the multitude is the social multiplicity that is able to act in common. It is able to be active, so that these various differences can act together, can act in common.
If that is too philosophical, let me give an example.
It seems to me in the North American context we inherited two models of organisation in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. They were seen as exclusionary. We had the unitary model, the party model , in which the movements are unified under a single leaderships. There can be many movements, but they are unified under one leadership.
In contrast to that we also had a refusal of that unitary model, insisting on differences and on the autonomy of these differences. In North America the feminist movement, the race movements, the gay and lesbian movements were central t this conception, this refusal of unitary centralised organising. There seems to an insoluble choice between identity and difference.
Now its seems to me that since Seattle in 1999 - it probably started earlier, it would be better to locate it in Chiapas - at least since Seattle 1999 we were forced to recognise we no longer faced these alternatives.
First of all we saw in Seattle the groups that we thought were objectively antagonistic, contradictory to each other were actually acting in common. The trade unionists, the environmentalist, the gays and lesbians, church groups, the anarchists, the communists, they were actually working together yet keeping their differences. Weve seen a new model of organising, a model that refuses the contradictory couple of identity and difference, that refuses to say either we all united under the same centralisation or each act individually in our separate parts. What weve seen instead is that we have to recognise - we even have difficulty; understanding it at a conceptual level, but we have to understand it at a political level - that we can remain different, that we have to remain different, but that we must act in common. Sometimes this is referred to as a movement of movements, to grasp this notion of our autonomy and our commonality. Sometimes as the notion of network, thinking of the distributive notion of the network of the internet, these various terms have come about independently to try to understand this new model of organising.
So it seems to me that this contradictory conceptual couple of identity and difference has been displaced by a complementary conceptual couple of commonality and multiplicity.
If identity and difference contradict one another, you have to choose one or the other. In fact commonality and multiplicity do not contradict. WE can be both, in fact we must be both.
So the notion of the multitude is trying to mean that. The notion is that we have to have a new kind of organising that gets away from the exclusionary centralised intractability that has traditionally been associated with the party and traditionally been associated with the exclusion of various social groups.
updated on 09/09/2010
