Swenson

Constituting Opposition: Antonio Negri and the Concept of Real
Subsumption.


Antonio Negri argues in several places (Twenty Thesis on Marx, Marx
Beyond Marx:  Lessons on the Grundrisse, Insurgencies:  Constituent
Power and the Modern State, and The Savage Anomaly) that the current
mode of production of advanced capital can be understood in Marxian
terms as a system that has achieved the point of real subsumption.
Or, that the capitalist mode of production has achieved a level of
development whereby it has subsumed not only the traditional bourgeois
capitalist mode of production, but also any socialist model, and most
insidiously even the smallest fraction of any individuals social
production.  This argument essentially claims that there has been a
transformation in the relation between work time the time of ones
direct involvement in creating surplus value and exploitation.  The
mode of real subsumption is capable of extracting from any production
even and especially production different from traditional forms of
work surplus value for capital.  Negri argues that this is the result
of the transformation in the mode of production from a system of
production to a system based on circulation, where every moment of
communication is transformed either directly or indirectly into
surplus value.  Capital has advanced to a point where to be alive is
to be at work.

In this paper I will give a brief analysis of Negris argument
concerning real subsumption, along with the relevant passages in Marxs
Grundrisse on which Negri bases his argument, in order to argue that
rather than being a hopeless situation for the struggle for
liberation, it is, in fact, only within a system of real subsumption
that there is the potential for a truly radical politics.  This is a
complex argument, and one that forces us to ask many questions about the form that
liberatory activity in our time would need to take in order to
successfully combat the forces of capitalism.  In my paper I hope to
pose these questions in such a way as to provoke discussion and
analysis of Negris work, as well as raise relevant questions as to the role of
theory and the intellectual in this struggle.


I am currently a Ph.D.  candidate in Comparative Studies in Discourse
and

Society at the University of Minnesota.  If accepted, I look forward
to meeting other graduate students interested in Marxist theory and
questions of liberation.


I can be reached at:  Brynnar Swenson swen0171@tc.umn.edu 3052 11th
Ave.  S #8 Minneapolis, MN 55407 (612) 724-1832