Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 253

disciplinary regime constructs the tendency toward a global market

of labor power, it constructs also the possibility of its antithesis. It

constructs the desire to escape the disciplinary regime and tenden-

tially an undisciplined multitude of workers who want to be free.

The increasing mobility of large portions of the global proletar-

iat is another important consequence of the tendential uniﬁcation

of the world market. In contrast to the old imperialist regimes

in which the currents of labor mobility were primarily regulated

vertically between colony and metropole, the world market opens

up wider horizontal paths. The constitution of a global market

organized along a disciplinary model is traversed by tensions that

open mobility in every direction; it is a transversal mobility that is

rhizomatic rather than arborescent. Our interest here is not only

in giving a phenomenological description of the existing situation,

but also in recognizing the possibilities inherent in that situation.

The new transversal mobility of disciplined labor power is signiﬁcant

because it indicates a real and powerful search for freedom and the

formation of new, nomadic desires that cannot be contained and

controlled within the disciplinary regime.

It is true that many

workers across the world are subject to forced migrations in dire

circumstances that are hardly liberatory in themselves. It is true,

too, that this mobility rarely increases the cost of labor power; in

fact, it most often decreases it, increasing instead the competition

among workers. The mobility does carry for capital a high price,

however, which is the increased desire for liberation.

Some signiﬁcant macroeconomic effects follow from the new

mobility introduced by capital’s global disciplinary paradigm. The

mobility of populations makes it increasingly difﬁcult to manage

national markets (particularly national labor markets) individually.

The adequate domain for the application of capitalist command

is no longer delimited by national borders or by the traditional

international boundaries. Workers who ﬂee the Third World to

go to the First for work or wealth contribute to undermining the

boundaries between the two worlds. The Third World does not

really disappear in the process of uniﬁcation of the world market

254 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

but enters into the First, establishes itself at the heart as ghetto,

shantytown, favela, always again produced and reproduced. In turn,

the First World is transferred to the Third in the form of stock

exchanges and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers

of money and command. Economic geography and political geogra-

phy both are destabilized in such a way that the boundaries among

the various zones are themselves ﬂuid and mobile. As a result, the

entire world market tends to be the only coherent domain for the

effective application of capitalist management and command.

At this point the capitalist regimes have to undergo a process

of reform and restructuring in order to ensure their capacity to

organize the world market. This tendency emerges clearly only in

the 1980s (and is established deﬁnitively after the collapse of the

Soviet model of modernization), but already at the moment of its

ﬁrst appearance its principal features are clearly deﬁned. It has to

be a new mechanism of the general control of the global process

and thus a mechanism that can coordinate politically the new dy-

namics of the global domain of capital and the subjective dimensions

of the actors; it has to be able to articulate the imperial dimension

of command and the transversal mobility of the subjects. We will

see in the next section how this process was realized historically,

and thus we will begin to address directly the processes of the

constitution of a global apparatus of government.

Real Subsumption and the World Market

Before we move on, the expository development of our study

demands that we look more closely at the relationship between

this tendency toward the realization of the world market and the

paradigm of disciplinary production and government. How does

the spread of disciplinary regimes throughout the world represent

a fundamental genealogical moment of Empire? We can give one

explanation why this is the case by linking Marx’s description of

the phases of the capitalist subsumption of society together with

his analyses of the tendency toward the world market. The two

movements actually coincide at a certain point, or really the capitalist

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 255

subsumption of society tends to be completed in the construction

of the world market.

Earlier we saw that the practices of imperialism involve capital’s

internalization of its outside and are thus processes of the formal

subsumption of labor under capital. Marx uses the term ‘‘formal

subsumption’’ to name processes whereby capital incorporates under

its own relations of production laboring practices that originated

outside its domain.

The processes of formal subsumption are thus

intrinsically related to the extension of the domain of capitalist

production and capitalist markets. At a certain point, as capitalist

expansion reaches its limit, the processes of formal subsumption

can no longer play the central role. The processes of the real subsump-

tion of labor under capital do not rely on the outside and do not

involve the same processes of expansion. Through the real subsump-

tion, the integration of labor into capital becomes more intensive

than extensive and society is ever more completely fashioned by

capital. There are certainly processes of real subsumption without

a world market, but there cannot be a fully realized world market

without the processes of real subsumption. In other words, the

realization of the world market and the general equalization or at

least management of rates of proﬁt on a world scale cannot be the

result simply of ﬁnancial or monetary factors but must come about

through a transformation of social and productive relations. Disci-

pline is the central mechanism of this transformation. When a new

social reality is formed, integrating both the development of capital

and the proletarianization of the population into a single process, the

political form of command must itself be modiﬁed and articulated in

a manner and on a scale adequate to this process, a global quasi-

state of the disciplinary regime.

Marx’s intuitions of the processes of real subsumption do not

furnish us with the key we need. The passage from the formal

subsumption to the real must be explained through the practices

of active subjective forces. In other words, disciplinarity pushed to

its extreme, imposed by the global Taylorization of labor processes,

cannot actually determine the need for a new form of command

256 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

except through the expression of active social subjectivities. The

globalization of markets, far from being simply the horrible fruit

of capitalist entrepreneurship, was actually the result of the desires

and demands of Taylorist, Fordist, and disciplined labor power across

the world. In this sense, the processes of the formal subsumption

anticipated and carried through to maturity the real subsumption,

not because the latter was the product of the former (as Marx himself

seemed to believe), but because in the former were constructed

conditions of liberation and struggle that only the latter could con-

trol. The movements of desiring subjectivities forced the develop-

ment to go forward—and proclaimed that there was no turning

back. In response to these movements in both the dominant and

the subordinated countries, a new form of control had to be posed

in order to establish command over what was no longer controllable

in disciplinary terms.

RIMITIVE

CCUMULATIONS

Just when the proletariat seems to be disappearing from the world stage,

the proletariat is becoming the universal ﬁgure of labor. This claim is not

actually as paradoxical as it may seem. What has disappeared is the

hegemonic position of the industrial working class, which has not disappeared

or even declined in numbers—it has merely lost its hegemonic position and

shifted geographically. We understand the concept ‘‘proletariat,’’ however,

to refer not just to the industrial working class but to all those who are

subordinated to, exploited by, and produce under the rule of capital. From

this perspective, then, as capital ever more globalizes its relations of produc-

tion, all forms of labor tend to be proletarianized. In each society and across

the entire world the proletariat is the ever more general ﬁgure of social labor.

Marx described the processes of proletarianization in terms of primitive

accumulation, the prior or previous accumulation necessary before capitalist

production and reproduction can begin to take place. What is necessary is

not merely an accumulation of wealth or property, but a social accumulation,

the creation of capitalists and proletarians. The essential historical process,

then, involves ﬁrst of all divorcing the producer from the means of production.

For Marx it was sufﬁcient to describe the English example of this social

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 257

transformation, since England represented the ‘‘highest point’’ of capitalist

development at the time. In England, Marx explains, proletarianization

was accomplished ﬁrst by the enclosures of the common lands and the clearing

of peasants from the estates, and then by the brutal punishment of vagabond-

age and vagrancy. The English peasant was thus ‘‘freed’’ from all previous

means of subsistence, herded toward the new manufacturing towns, and

made ready for the wage relation and the discipline of capitalist production.

The central motor for the creation of capitalists, by contrast, came from

outside England, from commerce—or really from conquest, the slave trade,

and the colonial system. ‘‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undis-

guised looting, enslavement and murder,’’ Marx writes, ‘‘ﬂowed back to

the mother-country and were turned into capital there.’’

The enormous

inﬂux of wealth overﬂowed the capacities of the old feudal relations of

production. English capitalists sprang up to embody the new regime of

command that could exploit this new wealth.

It would be a mistake, however, to take the English experience of

becoming-proletarian and becoming-capitalist as representative of all the

others. Over the last three hundred years, as capitalist relations of production

and reproduction have spread across the world, although primitive accumula-

tion has always involved separating the producer from the means of production

and thereby creating classes of proletarians and capitalists, each process of

social transformation has nonetheless been unique. In each case the social

and productive relations that preexisted were different, the processes of the

transition were different, and even the form of the resulting capitalist relations

of production and especially those of reproduction were different in line with

speciﬁc cultural and historical differences.

Despite these important differences, it is still useful to group the

modern processes of primitive accumulation under two general models that

highlight the relationship between wealth and command, and between inside

and outside. In all cases, the primitive accumulation of capital requires a

new combination of wealth and command. What is distinctive about the

ﬁrst model, which Marx described for England and which applies generally

to Europe as a whole, is that the new wealth for the primitive accumulation

of capital comes from the outside (from the colonial territories) and the

command arises internally (through the evolution of English and European

258 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

relations of production). According to the second model, which characterizes

most of the modern processes of primitive accumulation outside Europe, the

terms are reversed, such that the new wealth arises from within and command

comes from the outside (usually European capital). This inversion of wealth/

command and inside/outside in the two models leads to a whole series of

differences in the economic, political, and social formations of capital across

the world. Many of these differences deriving from the two models were

described adequately by theorists of underdevelopment in terms of central

and peripheral capitalist formations.

As we pass from modernity to postmodernity, the processes of primitive

accumulation do indeed continue. Primitive accumulation is not a process

that happens once and then is done with; rather, capitalist relations of

production and social classes have to be reproduced continually. What has

changed is the model or mode of primitive accumulation. First of all, the

play between inside and outside that distinguishes the two modern models

has progressively declined. More important, the nature of the labor and

wealth accumulated is changing. In postmodernity the social wealth accumu-

lated is increasingly immaterial; it involves social relations, communication

systems, information, and affective networks. Correspondingly, social labor

is increasingly more immaterial; it simultaneously produces and reproduces

directly all aspects of social life. As the proletariat is becoming the universal

ﬁgure of labor, the object of proletarian labor is becoming equally universal.

Social labor produces life itself.

We should emphasize the central role that informational accumulation

plays in the processes of postmodern primitive accumulation and the ever

greater socialization of production. As the new informational economy

emerges, a certain accumulation of information is necessary before capitalist

production can take place. Information carries through its networks both the

wealth and the command of production, disrupting previous conceptions of

inside and outside, but also reducing the temporal progression that had

previously deﬁned primitive accumulation. In other words, informational

accumulation (like the primitive accumulation Marx analyzed) destroys or

at least destructures the previously existing productive processes, but (differ-

ently than Marx’s primitive accumulation) it immediately integrates those

productive processes in its own networks and generates across the different

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 259

realms of production the highest levels of productivity. The temporal sequence

of development is thus reduced to immediacy as the entire society tends to

be integrated in some way into the networks of informational production.

Information networks tend toward something like a simultaneity of social

production. The revolution of informational accumulation therefore requires

an enormous leap forward in the greater socialization of production. This

increased socialization, along with the reduction of social space and temporal-

ity, is a process that no doubt beneﬁts capital with increased productivity,

but is one also that points beyond the era of capital toward a new social

mode of production.

3.3

RESISTANCE, CRISIS, TRANSFORMATION

The continuity of struggle is easy: the workers need only them-

selves and the boss in front of them. But the continuity of organiza-

tion is a rare and complex thing: as soon as it is institutionalized it

quickly becomes used by capitalism, or by the workers’ movement

in the service of capitalism.

Mario Tronti

The New Left sprang . . . from Elvis’s gyrating pelvis.

Jerry Rubin

Earlier we posed the Vietnam War as a deviation from

the U.S. constitutional project and its tendency toward Empire.

The war was also, however, an expression of the desire for freedom

of the Vietnamese, an expression of peasant and proletarian subjec-

tivity—a fundamental example of resistance against both the ﬁnal

forms of imperialism and the international disciplinary regime. The

Vietnam War represents a real turning point in the history of con-

temporary capitalism insofar as the Vietnamese resistance is con-

ceived as the symbolic center of a whole series of struggles around

the world that had up until that point remained separate and distant

from one another. The peasantry who were being subsumed under

multinational capital, the (post)colonial proletariat, the industrial

working class in the dominant capitalist countries, and the new

strata of intellectual proletariat everywhere all tended toward a

common site of exploitation in the factory-society of the globalized

RESISTANCE, CRISIS, TRANSFORMATION 261

disciplinary regime. The various struggles converged against one

common enemy: the international disciplinary order. An objective unity

was established, sometimes with the consciousness of those in strug-

gle and sometimes without. The long cycle of struggles against the

disciplinary regimes had reached maturity and forced capital to

modify its own structures and undergo a paradigm shift.

Two, Three, Many Vietnams

In the late 1960s the international system of capitalist production

was in crisis.

Capitalist crisis, as Marx tells us, is a situation that

requires capital to undergo a general devaluation and a profound

rearrangement of the relations of production as a result of the

downward pressure that the proletariat puts on the rate of proﬁt.

In other words, capitalist crisis is not simply a function of capital’s

own dynamics but is caused directly by proletarian conﬂict.

This

Marxian notion of crisis helps bring to light the most important

features of the crisis of the late 1960s. The fall of the rate of proﬁt

and the disruption of relations of command in this period are best

understood when seen as a result of the conﬂuence and accumulation

of proletarian and anticapitalist attacks against the international capi-

talist system.

In the dominant capitalist countries, this period witnessed a

worker attack of the highest intensity directed primarily against the

disciplinary regimes of capitalist labor. The attack was expressed,

ﬁrst of all, as a general refusal of work and speciﬁcally as a refusal

of factory work. It was aimed against productivity and against any

model of development based on increasing the productivity of

factory labor. The refusal of the disciplinary regime and the afﬁrma-

tion of the sphere of non-work became the deﬁning features of a

new set of collective practices and a new form of life.

Second, the

attack served to subvert the capitalist divisions of the labor market.

The three primary characteristics of the labor market—the separa-

tion of social groups (by class strata, race, ethnicity, or sex), the

ﬂuidity of the labor market (social mobility, tertiarization, new

relations between directly and indirectly productive labor, and so

262 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

forth), and the hierarchies of the market of abstract labor—were

all threatened by the rising rigidity and commonality of worker

demands. The increasing socialization of capital led also toward the

social uniﬁcation of the proletariat. This increasingly uniﬁed voice

posed the general demand for a guaranteed social wage and a very

high level of welfare.

Third, and ﬁnally, the worker attack was

waged directly against capitalist command. The refusal of work and

the social uniﬁcation of the proletariat came together in a frontal

attack against the coercive organization of social labor and the

disciplinary structures of command. This worker attack was com-

pletely political—even when many mass practices, particularly of

youth, seemed decidedly apolitical—insofar as it exposed and struck

the political nerve centers of the economic organization of capital.

The peasant and proletarian struggles in the subordinate coun-

tries also imposed reform on local and international political regimes.

Decades of revolutionary struggle—from the Chinese Revolution

to Vietnam and from the Cuban Revolution to the numerous

liberation struggles throughout Latin America, Africa, and the Arab

world—had pushed forward a proletarian wage demand that various

socialist and/or nationalist reformist regimes had to satisfy and that

directly destabilized the international economic system. The ideol-

ogy of modernization, even when it did not bring ‘‘development,’’

created new desires that exceeded the established relations of pro-

duction and reproduction. The sudden increase in the costs of raw

materials, energy, and certain agricultural commodities in the 1960s

and 1970s was a symptom of these new desires and the rising pressure

of the international proletariat on the wage. The effects of these

struggles not only were a quantitative matter but also determined

a qualitatively new element that profoundly marked the intensity

of the crisis. For more than one hundred years the practices of

imperialism had worked to subsume all forms of production

throughout the world under the command of capital, and that

tendency was only intensiﬁed in this period of transition. The

tendency created necessarily a potential or virtual unity of the

international proletariat. This virtual unity was never fully actualized