I’ve started to think that there are some analogies between Negri and Zizek: a similar prolificality of work, and what I’ve begun to see as a similar playfulness (although Negri suffers in this comparison, Zizek being both more prolific and funnier). Be that as it may, this little piece begins playfully enough, but leads into some serious and substantive points that bear on our discussions here recently on the implications of the transnationalization of capital. This translation originally appeared in Radical Philosophy.
The reason is easy to explain: the Keynesian New Deal was the outcome of an institutional configuration based on three essential prerequisites: a nation-state capable of independently developing national economic policies; the ability to measure profits and wages inside a relation of redistribution that is democratically accepted; and industrial relations that allow for a dialectics between the interests of the enterprise and the movements and demands of the working class that can be agreed upon in a legal framework. None of these prerequisites exists in the present circumstances of political economy….As a result, there is no room for any institutional policy of reform in contemporary capitalism. The structural instability of capitalism is definitive, no New Deal is possible.
No New Deal is possible
Antonio Negri
John Maynard Keynes was a gentleman – that is, an honest bourgeois, not a petty-bourgeois like Proudhon, or an ideologue, but an easy man – and when political economy was still concerned with the political ordering of market and society every classical economist knew this. Keynes thought that knowledge functioned factually and that, in the culture of pragmatism, a teleological dispositif needed to be brought into the analysis of series of phenomena and their assemblage; that by organizing the order of facts one could cautiously and efficiently construct the order of reason. In his case, this dispositif consisted in securing the reproduction of the capitalist system.
In Keynes’s times economic science was not that horrid little mathematical device that all variants of financial adventurism and derivations of rent now have at their disposal. Now we know what happens when this mathematization ends up in the hands of dodgers’ individualism… This is not to say that mathematics has nothing to do with economics or other disciplines; quite the opposite: it can be useful and productive for political economy, but at a completely different level. One instance is where neo-Keynsianism resulted from the encounter between socialist planners in the Soviet Union (or the liberal planners of the New Deal) and the mathematicians of market rationalization invented by Léon Walras. But for Keynes and his contemporaries the relationship between reason and reality was still entirely political: capital still sought clarity for itself.
Keynes entered the scene of economic science and the political field of the critique of political economy at the end of World War I, as a member of the British delegation at the Conference of Versailles. Shocked by the stupidity of the politicians who wanted to crush Germany with further impoverishment, he stated in The Economic Consequences of Peace: ‘Vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.’ In 1919 – witness to the folly of elites who, engaged in reshaping the postwar order in fear of the powerful appeal of Red October, tried to apply the methods of classical imperialism inside Europe – Keynes already warned against ‘that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation’. He realized that the Russian Revolution had completely changed the political economy of capitalism, the market was definitively broken, and that ‘one divided into two’ (as a Communist leader would later say).
The fact that capitalist development was traversed and prefigured by class struggle and its movements had to be acknowledged, and Keynes expressed a first sign of this realization when he wrote: ‘Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency… Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society.’ So he scientifically tackled this political problem: how to use currency and finance to defeat communism. On Keynes’s trail this became the main question of political economy for the whole of the twentieth century.
Keynes’s communism of capital
Keynes believed in the virtues of finance; he even had an equivocal relationship with the Stock Exchange until he got kicked in the teeth – as often happens even to the most adept. (I disagree here with his biographer Harrod, who claimed that Keynes had financial speculation in his heart.) From Keynes’s realistic point of view, the virtue of finance was that it was the beating heart of capitalism. Keynes subverted the old moralist conceptions that, from the Middle Ages to Hilferding, had downplayed and disqualified the hegemony of money in the production of wealth and the reproduction of social order. Against them, Keynes claimed that financial markets functioned as wealth multipliers. Can this theoretical assumption still be valid in a period of economic crisis? ‘Of course it can’, he asserted from his position in the middle of the crisis that started in the 1920s and assumed gigantic proportions by the end of the same decade. The state will have to intervene in society and reorganize it productively: ‘Thus it is to our best advantage to reduce the rate of interest to that point relatively to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment.’1
This was how the entire therapeutic cookbook of Keynsianism emerged out of the crisis that kept affecting development. In building a new model of equilibrium whilst being pragmatic and keeping the continuous lack of equilibrium in mind, Keynes proposed to determine a persisting imbalance of state initiative through deficit spending. However, this deficit created new margins for effective demand and aided the development of capitalist dynamics whilst accepting the severe rigidity in workers’ wages. This was the way class struggle got reabsorbed into the system of capital.
Keynes’s proposal was wholly progressivist. He fully recognized it when, in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary relations, he faced the opposition of the conservative representatives of Washington who were not willing to allow the currency of reference to forget a real standard, as this standard was the dollar that functioned as a means to organize labour and its international division based on the accumulation of gold in the US Central Bank. For them, deficit spending – which each capitalist and national government could have advanced so as to progressively contain the movements of its national working class, who sought to change society and break the capitalist yoke – needed to be controlled by a capitalist centre, the Komintern of Wall Street. Farewell to the illusion of bancor, Keynes’s great invention, an ideal currency based on free exchange that could have given way to the establishment of different equilibriums that referred to the desires of populations and the intensity of the struggle of the organized working class…
Keynes was a serious capitalist: he knew that with reaction and revolution, on the one hand, and an established socialist power, on the other, there was no third way of defending capitalist interests, only a more advanced political synthesis. Deriding the ‘hegemony of real production’, Keynes believed that when confronted with production – production here as ‘civil society’ – finance could become the mediation of opposing class interests, the construction of a new model of capitalism. Against Bolshevism Keynes refuted the slogan ‘Power to the workers’ and its corollary legitimization ‘he who will not work shall not eat’.2 He also realized that socialism and communism went beyond the prospects of constructing a new order of labour and these primitive watchwords and banal political objectives. According to Keynes, communism could represent the totality of abstract labour extracted from the totality of workers in society, every citizen, and hence all socialized human beings. Accepting these paradoxical exclamations, we could now say that communism is the form of the ‘biopolitical’, intending by ‘biopolitical’ the fact that not only society but also life has been put to the work of commodity production and that not only social relations but the relationship between minds and bodies have been made productive. With great foresight, Keynes seems to have understood the advent of what we now call ‘the communism of capital’.
Keynes wished to contain class struggle within the rules of a society where the exploitation of labour was directed not simply towards the production of profit but also towards progress in the satisfaction of needs. We can understand how strong was his hatred for the rentier! Keynes thought that anyone willing to save the capitalist system must hope for the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, and he saw this as a morally legitimate and politically urgent task, because the rentier is anarchic, selfish, and exploits the possession of land and estates, metropolitan spaces, as well as the labour that surrounds them and keeps valorizing them. The rentier spends nothing in the game; he earns without working and wins without fighting. This squalid exploiter has to be eliminated. And here he reached the highest point of the capitalist intelligence that spent the twentieth century trying to understand its enemy in class struggle.
Fighting for basic income
Allow me a smile at this point. Keynes looks like a subversive genius, in view of the centrality of rent to the post-industrial system of organization of contemporary capital. Today no political leader or economic thinker has the courage to attack rent. … All we see are moralistic sweeps against the obvious thieves and corruptors of banking credit systems. But who is attacking the habitual and surreptitious thieves, the rentiers who are worse than the usurers? Who will ever bring into the frame the sacred, both real and symbolic, foundation of every form of property? Keynes tried, to no avail, but at least he tried…
The attack on rent was certainly the highlight of Keynes’s political discourse but also the point where the illusory character of his reasoning becomes manifest. In fact, as he developed his progressivist discourse aimed at salvaging capitalism, Keynes too often forgot the preconditions on which it rested. Two preconditions were insuperable and, in his view, beyond doubt: one was that colonial power, as an accomplished fact and a tendency, had finally consolidated; the other was that the form assumed by the organization of class relations in trade unions and the social welfare infrastructure in Europe was definitive. The difficulty with presenting Keynesianism as the dominant theory of development between the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century derives from the massive transformations of labour, class composition and the geopolitical dimensions of class struggle. From this perspective, from the turn of our century, Keynes is no more than an event, an intellectual flash of intuition of the twentieth century, at the endpoint of the long crisis of Western capitalism. His response to the Soviet revolution was adequate and representative of the hegemonic urge to bring class struggle under the control and development of capital, but no more than that. It failed to account for the global extension of class struggle, the end of colonialism, and, above all, the exhaustion of the ability of capital to transform modes of exploitation and accumulation in the First World. Look at what happened after Keynes: the revolution advanced through the underdeveloped world preventing capital from governing with the instruments of classical colonialism; dependency gave way to interdependency; capital won by globalizing and unifying itself, but at the same time it also lost, because the old order was certainly destroyed and building a new one is a hard task. That is why it is impossible to recuperate Keynes today.
The reason is easy to explain: the Keynesian New Deal was the outcome of an institutional configuration based on three essential prerequisites: a nation-state capable of independently developing national economic policies; the ability to measure profits and wages inside a relation of redistribution that is democratically accepted; and industrial relations that allow for a dialectics between the interests of the enterprise and the movements and demands of the working class that can be agreed upon in a legal framework. None of these prerequisites exists in the present circumstances of political economy.
The nation-state is in crisis because of the processes of internationalization of production and financial globalization, which are the grounds for a definition of a supranational imperial power. Furthermore, the dynamics of productivity increasingly tend to depend on immaterial production and the involvement of human and cognitive faculties that are hard to measure by traditional criteria, so social productivity makes it impossible to ground the regulation of wages on the relationship to productivity. The crisis of the trade unions is, from this perspective, exemplary – albeit not definitive – of the development of contemporary capitalism. And so when we come to the crisis of contractual relations, all the subjects of Keynesian agreements are absent. Moreover, the only thing capitalist interests share is the pursuit of short-term profit, first, and the radical exploitation of the chances for enjoying rent from land, estate and services, second. All of this makes it practically impossible to formulate progressive reforms.
As a result, there is no room for any institutional policy of reform in contemporary capitalism. The structural instability of capitalism is definitive, no New Deal is possible. If we really want to make the effort of resurrecting Keynes, we should direct his deficit spending – his idea of the socialization of investments – towards the institutions of basic income and towards policies that anticipate new forms of development and organize the fiscal structure of the state in relation to the global productivity of the system – that is, the productive power of all citizens. By doing so we would probably move beyond the measures and anthropological requirements of a capitalist society, especially well beyond the ideologies of individualism (of property and patrimony) and the political consequences of its development. Basic income is more than a wage; it is the recognition of the exploitation that affects not only workers but everyone who is available to capitalist organization in society. Fighting for a basic income and recognizing this reality already signals a move beyond the image of capitalist ownership. One has divided into two: whilst Keynes incessantly worked to close this division and redirect all social struggles to the One, in a Hobbesian way, today sees the opening of this division and of struggles. A season of class struggle is probably flourishing. Keynes loved dance (he married a dancer), not flowers (he was allergic to them).
Translated by Arianna Bove
Notes
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, ch. 24.
- The saying ‘Qui non laborat, non manducet’ originally appeared in the Bible, 2 Thessalonians, 3. It notably recurred in Jeremy Bentham’s (1797) Writings on the Poor Laws as the ‘No work – no eat principle’. In other languages it appears as ‘No mill, no meal’, ‘Il faut travailler, qui veut manger’ (Fr.), ‘Wer nicht arbeitet, soll auch nicht essen’ (Ger.), ‘Chi non lavora non mangia’ (Ital.), ‘El que no trabaja, no come’ (Sp.) [Trans.].
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The idea that for instituional reforms in contemporary capitalism strikes me as a bit deterministic and the way the class struggle is presented looks more like a dichotomy of struggle rather than a dialectic.
In other words the class struggle itself will determine in what ways the emergence of a TCC continues to develop. For instance what if a major economic power (ie. India, etc.) undergoes a revolutionary process where in a socialist state is esablished. This will have profound effects on the development of a TCC. For instance the idea and the reality of a “supra-national imperial estate or the TCC will have significantly lost vast areas for the geographical expansion and movement of capital. A shift will have occurred not unlike the one Keynes watched after the Red October. Not only will a major economic player have been lost to revolution, but additionally developing nations will again have an alternative model of development to choose from and many small states who have been complaining about their prospects for real growth given the unfair trade practices of the core capitalist areas may be lost to capital as well.
A situation like this would increase the likely hood that a TCC would have to, much like Keynes, figure out ways to bring the class struggle to a place where it is played out under the TCC’s own terms (ie. finding ways to implement various labor and poor friendly reforms).
Even short of revolutionary transformation, it is possible that global conflagration (perhaps more food riots, or rebellions over national austerity measures in some of the cores) can lead to a situation where sections of a TCC will be forced to figure ways to implement reforms that can pacify intransigent populations.
Many left theorists are now positing the idea of structural crisis that capital won’t be able to get out of. However in other periods of crisis capital has been able to adjust count its losses and begin new cycles of growth. It maybe that there is a structural crisis of the nation state structure, yet without any clear pathway toward any new structural formation of capital able to establish a new global hegemony for the capitalist class. This may lead to a situation where a global conflagrations become more common and more rapid and where transnational forms of resistance become much more feasible, however it is not a given that this will automaticsally benefit the radical right or left.
I’m not sure in any regard how the call or the establishment of a basic income (essentially the right to eat) breaks out of a the capitalist framework in and of itself. How is this anything more than the idea of a global social welfare state still dominated by the TCC though with some major concessions made to the labouring and poor classes? Did Negri just refute his own argument?
So for one the class struggle necessarily will determine the development of capital even as it seems the nation state model is in crisis. Secondly crisis may make the class struggle more acute but it doesn’t mean a qualitative leap either to something completely different from capitalism (ie. the stationary state, a global social welfare state, neo-fascism, etc.). It is possible though, something that I havn’t heard anyone argue that the TCC will figure out the structural formations it must implement when faced with certain situations, and even possible that it may implement reforms for a period of time (perhaps a global welfare state, perhaps welfare in only certain problem regions), and then discard these reforms when they are no longer deemed necessary. Of course hopefully revolutionary communists will have something to say about how things develop too.
I agree with Nat W. that Negri exhibits very weak reasoning/ argumentation here in his movement from point to point, as well as a basic neglect of class struggle and its possibilities. There are other points of analysis too where I find him careless or wrong – and then there are those crucial aspects which I don’t fully understand (the “cognitive capitalism” thesis). But I do think that he is on to the crucial point of the transnationalization of capital (“the processes of internationalization of production and financial globalization”), whose implications he is attempting to explore, and this is valuable.
Now does this transnationalization provide “grounds for a definition of a supranational imperial power,” as Negri believes? I think this is not an either/or question, and requires more exploration and some delicacy of analysis, as it were, which I haven’t really found in anything I’ve read by Negri (which admittedly is not a large amount). (I hope to post more on this question in the not-too-distant future.)
I think Nat W is very succinct here: “Many left theorists are now positing the idea of structural crisis that capital won’t be able to get out of.” I don’t find that idea very convincing and don’t understand its function.
About the Negri essay, I’m sorry but I think this piece is terrible. Negri has his moments, but this isn’t one of them. This is like a compression or distillation of the problems that plague Negri’s work, boiled down into one short piece. Ugh. For one thing – what is the point of any of this before “The attack on rent” paragraph? That’s where Negri really starts to lay out his perspective. Before that is a heavily compressed version of Keynes’ intellectual biography and world history, compressed to such a degree that it accomplishes as much distortion as it does illumination. It’s like reading the back of War and Peace or something – if that’s all someone is going to say, maybe it’d be better not to say anything on the subject. It’d be like saying about Negri “he went to prison for terrorism charges, he wrote a book on Spinoza, and once called for a new sort of entrepreneur as a political project.” All true, little interesting, and likely misleading.
“This was the way class struggle got reabsorbed into the system of capital.”
That’s ambiguous. I think it’s convincing and interesting that Keynesianism was a policy of (and Keynes’ writings were a theory of) making class struggle productive of capitalist development. The sentence is ambiguous though because on a strong reading it could imply that this was the only way that (and the first time that) class struggle was made productive of capitalist development. It seems to me that Keynes(ianism) does merit serious attention, but should be placed in a history (maybe, I dunno, perhaps the high point or smartest expression of this history) of making class struggle function for capitalist development. For the US that history would I think have to talk about the Progressive Era and earlier, the Commons School of economics and labor history, state and federal bureaus of labor statistics and departments of labor, various boards of mediation and arbitration etc. That could be quite interesting; it’s shame that few if any autonomists anymore seem to want to do make any serious historical engagement (why bother, we’re in the totally new era of real subsumption! which we know without reading much history…), and it’s odd too given that some of the early figures in that intellectual tradition were historians (Sergio Bologna, Bruno Ramirez, Peter Linebaugh, etc). Nowadays they’re primarily philosophers, of the sort who get jobs outside philosophy departments and don’t have philosophy degrees…
Anyway.
“According to Keynes, communism could represent the totality of abstract labour extracted from the totality of workers in society, every citizen, and hence all socialized human beings.”
Interesting. I’d like to know where he wrote that. And what terms for it he used, and what he intended. I have a hard time believing that this is quite what Keynes had in mind, since it sounds so much like Negri. I could be wrong. If the piece was better written it’d be easier to use this as an entry point into reading Keynes.
“different equilibriums that referred to the desires of populations and the intensity of the struggle of the organized working class”
“Keynes wished to contain class struggle within the rules of a society where the exploitation of labour was directed not simply towards the production of profit but also towards progress in the satisfaction of needs.”
When were either of these things not the case, at least to some degree, within capitalist society? When did capitalist society not involve, at least to some degree, equilibria of desire and struggle? When did capitalist production ever direct labor entirely and exclusively to profit rather than *some* measure of meeting needs?
“Accepting these paradoxical exclamations, we could now say that communism is the form of the ‘biopolitical’, intending by ‘biopolitical’ the fact that not only society but also life has been put to the work of commodity production and that not only social relations but the relationship between minds and bodies have been made productive.”
This sense of biopolitical is vacuous (this is why Paolo Virno has polemicized against the category of biopolitics, arguing that any meaning the term has is already implied in the category labor power; that’s a mistake but an understandable one given the bad sense of biopolitics – Negri’s, and Agambens’ – that Virno is responding to. He says “the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power,” here – http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm
In case anyone’s interested, I’ve got an essay on some of this w/r/t Negri. It’s much less snarky than I’m being here, and about as poorly written as this post; at the point I was still trying to hang on to as much of Negri’s framework as I could. That essay is here – http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/biopolitical-capitalism/ – one of these days I’m going to give it the ruthlessly critical edit it deserves, incorporate commentary on Hardt/Negri’s Commonwealth, and submit it to something. For now, it lives online.
Anyway, what does it mean to distinguish society and life? When was there ever a form of capitalism in which life was not “put to the work of commodity production”? When has there ever been any form of capitalism, or any other sort of production, in which “the relationships between minds and bodies” was not central to production?
About the present and the impossibility of a new deal…
“the dynamics of productivity increasingly tend to depend on immaterial production”
Negri used to talk about this as a hypothesis, now it’s like an axiom, and I’ve yet to ever see any attempt to seriously substantiate the point. For what it’s worth, part of what I got from Negri was understanding how ‘immaterial production’ is still work, something that maybe should have been obvious but wasn’t to me. Beyond that, I don’t see the use of any of this. I’d like to recommend two essays – “The Multitude and the Kangaroo” by David Canfield, published recently (ish) in Historical Materialism and “Reality Check: Are We Living in an Immaterial World?” by Steve Wright, published on the web site Mute.
“the involvement of human and cognitive faculties that are hard to measure by traditional criteria, so social productivity makes it impossible to ground the regulation of wages on the relationship to productivity.”
What are “traditional criteria” and why are the supposedly new (or newly hegemonic, Negri equivocates) forms of labor so hard to measure by them? And, what sorts of labor weren’t/aren’t hard to measure, and why? I say this for two reasons. One, Negri has been talking about what he sees as problems with measurement and value well before he was talking about immaterial labor. My hunch is that he’s starting from these ostensible problems and looking for more and more reasons to support his claims about them, and immaterial labor is convenient for doing so. Two, I think Negri here and in lots of other places implies some highly problematic assumptions about what he suggests is the era before the hegemony of immaterial production, about the operation of the forms of immaterial production that pre-existed the present, and about non-immaterial production.
The only thing I find genuinely compelling in this is the final paragraph or three. There, Negri suggests that the demand for a basic income is a sort of resurrected Keynesianism. That’s very interesting. Negri and others he’s networked with have made a lot of the demand for basic income. In this essay, he calls Keynesianism a theory and policy of maintaining capitalism (making class struggle functional for capitalist development) by/through meeting more human needs under capitalism. In light of that, it’s hard not to see basic income as doing the same. In that case, why would we want to get behind the demand for basic income? I don’t find Negri’s minimal comments here about basic income sufficient for showing how the contemporary sort of Keynesianism is revolutionary in some new way. I’m thinking here in part of Don Hamerquist’s remarks elsewhere on this site about Wallerstein, in which Don argued against Wallerstein’s call for palliative response and for trying to accelerate the breakdown of capitalism. I wasn’t convinced about that when I read it, but reading the Negri piece now I think I find Don’s point more compelling.
Nate, I’m not sure if you’re saying that you don’t find the idea that many left thinkers are positing the conclusion of a sought of crisis in capitalism that can’t be solved in traditional ways or you’re saying that you don’t think a significant ammount of left thinkers are not really drawing this type of a conclusion. For my part this is just an observation of a phenomenon and I think the proof rests in articles by Gopal B, David Harvey, Wallerstein, Amin, Hammerquist, most of which have been posted on this website.
I don’t know that the observation itself serves a function, though I think the observation is relevant because of the commonality of conclusions arrived at from divergent methods of analysis. I think it indicates a phenomenon that is important to pay attention to and that it probably goes hand in hand with the emerging development of a TCC; being that these two developments are occurring together during the current state revolutionaries find themselves in. In other words, due to a unprecedented global crisis described and evaluated by many left thinkers, due in part to this internationalization of production and financial globalization, capitalists are beginning to observe things and also act from the view of the needs of globalized capital, and not always through the particular national intetests of certain capitals. So if there is a function, I guess there it is, it serves a mode for understanding how the two things are actually working together as the class struggle and capital accumulation develop.
I know that still remains vague and I don’t have a whole thesis worked out, about strucutral crisis or a TCC but these are only my thoughts so far based on what I have read.
Thanks for this very pointed critique, Nate, which I find compelling. I’d like to take up your last point, about the “basic income” demand. Negri says,
I’d understand him to mean, then, that capitalism is at a point at which major reforms (which basic income would be) are impossible within it, so that this demand goes beyond capitalism in this historical era. His reasoning, then, is very much along the lines as that lying behind the old Trotskyist strategy of “transitional demands,” which were taken to be, although reformist in appearance, revolutionary in essence because in actuality unsatisfiable by capitalism.
Now I agree this is a terrible strategy. But I’d like to move beyond a dichotomy between suggestions of reforms (either Wallerstein’s palliative measures or this sort of revolution-by-stealth approach), on the one hand, and Don’s “expediting the breakdown of the system” on the other. I raised some points about the latter in the discussion thread under Crisis of the Capitalist State, and as I indicated there I am not quite sure what Don may be intending by this phrase. But be that as it may, I’d like to point in what I believe is a little different direction, to the need for work in the realm of ideas (to take a very broad term) and the propagation of ideas.
That is, I think any strategy to break out of this system and into a realm which is possible but not seen to be such (and I mean communism and the realm of human freedom) — that any such strategy has got to be built around (or at least to essentially include) the bringing to real life of “the communist hypothesis.” How to do this is (of course!) not easy or clear, but how do we see going forward without it?
(This is besides, of course, the sort of “idea work” involved in understanding the dynamics of the present world and working to form a strategy toward the future.)
Nat, sorry I wasn’t clear. You said “Many left theorists are now positing the idea of structural crisis that capital won’t be able to get out of.” I think that’s a succinct statement of what many people are indeed positing. I don’t find those left theorists convincing when they posit this sort of idea.
John, from our previous exchanges I think we have some disagreements about some things with regard to work in the realm of ideas. Aside from that, I think I agree with everything you say here (I’ll check out the other thread tomorrow). Real quick on Negri in particular, I’m away from home and haven’t read Negri in a while but I’m fairly sure that the arguments he makes in favor of basic income change a great deal across his work (I’m also fairly sure that that this demand reaches back to some 1970s Italian movement ideas about ‘the social wage’ and/or ‘the political wage’). I agree with you that here he suggests (vaguely) that getting basic income would be already a step toward or a form of communism — you called it “revolution by stealth,” that’s a great term for this. Elsewhere I’m sure Negri says that this would re-invigorate capitalism. If it’s a stealth-revolution then there’s no particular reason for him to be honest when he says this would re-invigorate capitalism, since people might (according to this sort of stealth-revolutionary political view) support the demand for pro-capitalist reasons but objectively advance the stealth revolution. I do think Negri is subjectively committed to some sort of revolution as he understands it, so I suspect that he is doing this ‘revolution by stealth’ kind of thing and so the variation in justification may depend on his audience.