Infinite Labor in the Works of Negri, Hardt, and Gortz

Abstract

Аnastasia Kalk – a graduate student at the Department of Politics, the New School for Social Research, an author and editor of C4, an online journal about contemporary critical theory, New York, USA. Email: ans.kalk@gmail.com

The article examines relations between work experience and political subjectivity. This paper rests on the assumption that the two phenomena are co-dependent. Here, I describe two theoretical models explaining when and why labor experience becomes formative for political subjects. Negri and Hardt deploy the first theory of labor-politics relations. For them, politics always emerges inside a labor process. The authors endlessly destroy all the 'classic' contradictions Marx and Gramsci wrote about, including contradictions between labor and politics, material and immaterial labor, work and nonwork, and, finally, between intellectual and non-intellectual work content. It was the last opposition that, for Gramsci, conditioned the formation of political subjectivity. The philosophy of Negri and Hardt devoids the categories of labor and politics from a conflictual dimension. Taken together with the social relations the categories turn into something infinite and unalterable. The authors don’t leave to an individual a possibility of escaping from the world of work, i. e. a capacity of negating contemporary labor relations. In his works, Andre Gorz, the scholar often mentioned together with Negri and Hardt in the literature on 'the new capitalism' and precarious forms of employment, develops a different way of linking politics to the sphere of labor. In contrast to the first authors, Gorz distinguishes working life from non-working time. According to him, a political subject can emerge solely through the negation of work i. e. in the realm of non-working life. The impossibility of being full-time workers and constant transitions from being a worker to unemployed (an out-of-work person) and back, peculiar to precarious employees, make individuals more 'vulnerable' or prone to the political action aimed to transform a current social order.