The Powers of the Exploited and the Social Ontology of Praxis

Abstract

This contribution is the first part of a debate between Michael Hardt/Toni Negri and David Harvey on the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary. The discussion focuses on the question of what capitalism looks like today and how it can best be challenged. This contribution asks: In what type of capitalist society are we living today? And what is the Marxian praxis that we need to challenge it? First, this paper analyses capitalism in respect to the extraction of value from the common, immaterial labour, digitisation, automation, and finance capital. The greatest abstraction in the productive process of value, in its implementation of languages, codes, immaterial articulations of being together, cooperation, affective elements, and so forth presents also in the multitude the virtuality of an extraordinary potential of resistance and autonomy from capital. Second, the paper discusses what forms of praxis are needed today. Marxian ontology is constituted and always renewed by class struggle, by the material antagonism that distributes the elements of real being and by the continuous excess of value that living labour expresses. Today, we discuss Marxian praxis in a society where intelligence is put to work at the centre of the productive process. Here emerges with great force the theme of the liberation of humans from work, on the basis of the transformations of work. Marx demonstrates how much cognitive and intellectual activity is central to production, and how much fixed capital is mixed with cognitive labour. In this context, the notion of the appropriation of fixed capital is of key importance for class struggles.