Toni Negri on the Labor Theory of Value Becoming Obsolete

Discussion

Harry Cleaver:

"Negri and the Crisis of the Law of Value Negri’s argument takes exactly the opposite view of the contemporary role of labor within capitalism but comes to similar results with respect to value. Instead of labor being displaced as a major mechanism of domination, in Negri’s view it has been transformed from the hidden secret of commodity fetishism and market relations whose workings could be understood through Marx’s labor theory, to an unmediated vehicle of capitalist command. In his theoretical formulation this is understood in terms of a crisis in the law of value brought on by class struggle, a rise in the organic composition of capital and the displacement of labor in the production process. The crisis of labor value, he argues, has given way to the attempt by capital to impose labor not to produce wealth but as pure domination. One of Negri’s first formulations of his thesis of the crisis of the law of value appeared in “Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization,” which was written as a discussion paper for the 1971 conference of Potere Operaio, one of the most important organizations of the extra-parliamentary Left in Italy.

In that paper, Negri elaborated an analysis of the crisis of class relations brought on by the international cycle of working class struggles in the late 1960s — a cycle to which the struggles of Italian workers and students had contributed on a large scale. He argued that those struggles — not only of the waged but also of the unwaged (e.g., students, housewives)— had ruptured the ability of the Keynesian state to plan capitalist development (thus the “planner state”) by harnessing workers struggles (e.g., through wage-productivity deals) to become the motor of capitalist growth within the social factory. This crisis included the defeat of the Keynesian efforts to use money to mediate and manage the class relations, especially the dynamic proportionality between (social ) wages and (social) productivity.

While the wage-productivity relations was ruptured in many countries, this defeat received its clearest expression in Italy in overt demands for “equal wage increases regardless of productivity” and direct struggle against work.

For Negri this rupture amounted to a crisis of the law of value understood as “the law governing the social recomposition of labour.”

Taking as his theoretical point of reference the discussion in the Grundrisse of the evolving role of labor in capitalism, Negri argues that Marx’s projection of crisis as a result of the rise in the organic composition of capital (in response to workers struggles) was realized through the Keynesian state. The continuing displacement of labor from production through replacement by fixed capital, Marx argued, would produce a crisis in the role of labor and thus in the law of value. As immediate labor as such ceased to be the basis of production of wealth, labor value ceases to be a relevant category.27 At this point, one might imagine Negri’s argument to parallel those who would say goodbye to the working class because of the supposed dramatic drop in the numbers of workers involved in commodity production. But this is not the case. Despite the reduction in the contribution of labor to production, Negri argues that money and work both persist and remain central to capitalist command. “Money,” he writes, “still remains to enforce the capitalist appropriation of commodities.”28 “Money no longer represents a moment in the class relation, merely mediating exchange between labour and capital. It now comes to embody the one-sidedness of the relation, the unilateral, irresolvable, antagonistic, capitalistic will to domination.”29 At this point the law of value “excercizes its sway entirely at this level of arbitrariness and force.”30 In other words, the capitalist imposition of work is now separated from wealth creation; it is purely a repressive mechanism of social control. Capital “becomes more and more dissociated from a purely value definition and operates more and more in a context of relations of force.”

This line of argument not only provided a theoretical understanding of the effectiveness of the struggles of Italian workers for wage equalization but also provided a theoretical justification for the other side of their struggles: the refusal of work. A year before Negri’s discussion paper, the militants of Potere Operaio had written: “First comes the working class hatred for work, and then the discovery that at this stage of development of the productive forces mass industrial production is essentially make-work.”

What Negri has done is to show how Marx’s theory of capitalist development in the Grundrisse provides an explanation for this phenomenon; for what is “makework” if not work for work’s sake as pure domination? Thus, not surprisingly, Negri reaffirms Potere Operaio’s political strategy of the refusal of such makework. But he also went beyond this; while rejecting both reformism and revolutionary terrorism, he embraced a parallel strategy of mass working class direct appropriation of wealth —one being practiced in the streets of Italy during the early 1970s in the form of proletarian shopping, the self-reduction of prices, the use of public transportation without paying and the take-over of empty houses.

If wealth is no longer produced primarily by direct labor, but by a “social labor” embodied in fixed capital, then “the mass content of any working-class revolutionary organizational project today . . . can only, under these conditions, be based on a programme of direct social appropriation of the wealth that is socially produced.”

“The mass organization of an attack on social wealth as something that should be regarded as our own. Through this programme, the social individual, in the present given conditions of production, can recognize the present mode of production as a straitjacket constraining his own possibilities, and communism as the only reality which is adequate to his emergence as a new social subject of production.”35 In his subsequent writings, Negri has continued to view the continuing crisis of class relations in capitalism in terms of the crisis of the law of value. In his lectures presented at L’Ecole Normale in Paris in 1978 and collected in his Marx Oltre Marx, he expanded upon his reading of the Grundrisse to further develop his arguments.

The problem with this view, however, is that it artificially separates the concepts of labor as producer of wealth and labor as means of domination, associating only the former with value. Marx’s concept of value, I argue, has always designated primarily the role of labor as undifferentiated capitalist command rather than its role as producer of wealth. Indeed, the very distinction between use value and value is that between wealth understood as that which labor produces of use to the working class and that which labor produces of use to capital, i.e., command. From this point of view the crisis of value which Negri sees at the heart of the crisis of the Keynesian state must be understood essentially as a crisis of command, and the various ad-hoc strategies capital has tried to use to restore its command as means to the restoration of a dynamically stable labor-based social order. Thus I can agree with Negri’s conclusions concerning the centrality of the struggle against work and the potentialities of self-valorization to create a new social order, while disagreeing with his view of the obsolescence of value, and hence of the labor theory of value."

(https://thecommoner.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Harry-Cleaver-Work-Value-and-Domination-1.pdf)