1. History continues. This is a worrisome fact that we can no longer ignore. In the current situation, it is useful to re-examine the old Marxist axiom of the proletariat's assumption of its role as an historical subject. What does the proletariat mean today? Which changes has this class gone through? And who can, at present, pretend toward the role of a historical subject?

In the ancient world, there was no such concept as 'work' that would have covered creative self-expression and earning one's daily bread. Work was seen not as a means of self-improvement but as a drudgery - after all, it took away from important things such as politics or philosophy. Even Christianity cast work as a punishment: banished from Paradise, we are obliged to eat our bread in the sweat of our brow. Industriousness was not a pathway to salvation.

If you lived in what was once the Soviet Union, you might remember the official slogans and images that glorified  the working class. You will probably also remember the wide-spread, mutual antipathy between workers and intellectuals which accompanied such glorifications.

Oxana Timopheeva (O.T.): Your book "The Uprising of the Middle Class" is a great example how a thorough socio-economic analysis of contemporary globalized capitalism can be combined with the proof of its poor chances for survival…

Boris Kagarlitsky (B.K.): The conclusions drawn in this book are very simple: the core of resistance in our time is not to be found in the hungry masses, but in the middle class. I attempt to show that there are, in fact, neither losers nor winners. The system constantly reconfigures its social and professional structures. A person who makes a lot of money is also a victim of exploitation, sometimes even more so than somebody who is poorly paid.

Talk by Antonio Negri*Paris La Villette 'Le Trabendo' 14 Nov 14h-17h

We all agree to the fact that we want to fight capital and renew the world. But I think this ain't conceivable as a poetical process. Because the name 'multitude' is not a poetical notion, but a class concept. When I talk about multitude as a class concept, I talk about the fact that workers today work in the same and in different ways compared to those they worked some centuries ago. The working class and its class composition are quite different in the distinct periods that followed each other since the beginning of the industrial age.

This text is based on an article first published in Dagens Nyheter in Swedish in 1998.

The anomaly of Negri's trajectory as intellectual should be traced back to the early 1960s and his stellar academic career at the University of Padua. He was promoted to full professor at an extraordinarily young age in the field of "State theory". A long essay written in 1964, " Il lavoro nella costituzione " (Labor in the Constitution), was at the center of his intellectual development during this period. In it, Negri recognizes the foundational role of labor in the constitution of liberal democratic societies: both in terms of the formal constitution (the Italian Constitution, for example, begins "Italy is a democratic republic founded on labor") and in terms of the material constitution of society and social production. From this point of departure, Negri develops a Marxist critique of the State and capital that involves centrally a critique of labor itself. This is how we can recognize most clearly Negri's departure from the traditional communist and socialist political line of the period. The official left celebrated and affirmed labor as the means toward liberation, or even as liberation itself. Rather than a liberation of work, however, Negri argued for a liberation from work. Work itself is a disciplinary regime that must be attacked and destroyed by workers.

The problem of class in contemporary society is one of the most common and wide-spread rebukes hurled at the Left. "Where are your classes? Show us the oppressed class, the class with that special historical potential, the class that might become a revolutionary subject!" Some of the Left's representative will answer argumentatively, that the working class was re-dislocated in the process of the international division of labour. Others still might also say that post-industrialism has, in a certain (medial, ideological) way, displaced the theme of production, and with it, the worker, from its society of consumers. For some reason, the opponents of the Left never ask question as to the ruling class of today. Maybe this is because the answers are more than obvious: today's heavy-weight bourgeoisie has long since lost any semblance of humility, as their appearance in the mass-media takes on the splendour of a religious ceremony. If big business marks itself so openly, opposing itself to the rest of society, its totality cannot help but produce an oppressed class. In this society, everyone belongs to the proletariat, which is separated from the upper classes by an ever-widening gulf that seems impossible to breach. Distributed unevenly, the normalizing anaesthesia of "prosperity" only serves to hide a growing class distance, which we are no capable of imagining in any clear form.

Stop ? Machine ? Which machine ? The machine of the State ? Of war ? Of capitalist exploitation ? Of production?

Marx may have been an apocalyptic thinker (communism's salvation, the proletariat messiah), but he was also a positivist. He believed in positive science (in the positive nature of science), in progress, in the forward motion of the class struggle's piston, and in the impending outcome of the world-historical drama. His doctrine is constructed according to the models of natural science; social laws in it apply with physical rigour.

1. Labour is, first of all, the free creativity of people working together. Second, labour is the human being's communication with a resistant thing or with a foreign, external human will. Third of all, labour is a means of delaying the satisfaction of human desire in favour of executing an entire series of technical and ritual operations. Fourth, labour is the illusion or hallucination of having absolute power over a thing, of being able to bring it to life, of being able to make it human.

This text is compiled from materials published at the web page The Seven by Nine Squares.

"Carrying a provocative ambiguity which incited confusion, the Art Strike reintroduced a whole range of issues centred around questions of strategy, recuperation, and the relation between culture and politics." Sadie Plant "The Most Radical Gesture", (Routledge, London and New York, 1992)
"The Art Strike proves that doing nothing is often more productive than desperately seeking fame and fortune". Stewart Home, 1993

DR: As I was preparing for our conversation, I hit upon a link to a text "Justification of Art or the End of Intelligentsia", written for "Flash Art" in 1996. Yet I was both disappointed and intrigued to find that this link was dead: I was only able to find its ephemeral digital artefacts. I thought this dead link as a point of departure for our conversation on intellectual labour. In how far do you see the crisis of the Russian intelligentsia during the 1990s as a concession to the ephemeral production of "concepts" and "projects", which very soon lose their meaning? And does the fact that the link is dead mean that your views from 5 years ago have lost any of their original significance?

Production Line / Конвейер from chto delat on Vimeo.

a film by Dmitry Vilensky (2003) part of the installation "Negation of Negation"

"This film is a characteristic example of the video documentaries that Vilensky has shot in St Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin. In this case, he focuses on workers on a car assembly line in Nizhnyi Novgorod. The monotonous gallery of images is interrupted by shots of people leaving the building somehow too quickly. The context demonstrates that they are workers in the same factory, now going home from work. However, the scenes are more reminiscent of Hollywood disaster films with people running out of a skyscraper where a time bomb is ticking away: the building contains a machine that will destroy the existing order."
from Jekaterina Degot | The art of sabotage published at the catalogue of the exhibition "Faster than Histor", KIASMA, 2004

Screaming / Кричащие from chto delat on Vimeo.

a film by Dmitry Vilensky (2003) part of the installation "Negation of Negation"

This video was made at the demonstration organised by European Social Forum in Paris in November 2003, and is shown on one of the two monitors on the back side of the screening wall.

Sandwiched / Человек-Бутерброд from chto delat on Vimeo.

A film by Dmitry Vilensky based on the action in public space realized by the workgroup Chto Delat?

A group of Saint-Petersburg artists, intellectuals, and writers came out into one of the central city squares, to become, for a while, the
"sandwichmen" and "sandwichwomen". Each of them put on two advertising signs. The front one was empty. Language on strike. On the rear sign there were written various puzzling questions concerning the meaning and dignity of labour. The sandwichmen and sandwichwomen were handling newspapers to the passers by. The newspapers were also empty, except for their last page, where all the questions were listed together.

The film is based on the video material of these action and also include the fragments of the interviews made with real the "sandwichmen" and
"sandwichwomen" on the streets of Petersburg that reflects their descriptions of their working conditions and their place in society and
labour structures.

the questions put on placards:

Are you being exploited?
Are you exploiting somebody?
Is exploitation inevitable?

Did you dream of this job when you were a child?

Is work a woman thing?
Is work a man thing?
Is work a common thing?

Does work make you free?

Your boss needs you?
Your team needs you?
Your president needs you?
Who needs you anyway?

Who does not work, is not?

Are you afraid of the authorities?
Are the authorities afraid of you?
Let us be afraid together?

Happiness through labour?
Happiness through money?
How much does happiness cost?

Toni Negri speaks. Multitude or Working Class? from dmitry vilensky on Vimeo.

a film by Dmitry Vilensky (2003) part of the installation "Negation of Negation" 

Paris La Villette – Le Trabendo – 14 Nov – 14h-17h

We all agree to the fact that we want to fight capital and renew the world. But I think this ain’t conceivable as a poetical process. Because the name ”multitude“ is not a poetical notion, but a class concept. When I talk about multitude as a class concept, I talk about the fact that workers today work in the same and in different ways compared to those they worked some centuries ago. The working class and its class composition are quite different in the distinct periods that followed each other since the beginning of the industrial age.

see full transcription of the conversation